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On the Media
Breaking the Myth
00:50:18
Making sense of the events at the Capitol on Wednesday, unpacking the right-wing "Lost Cause" myth and its historical antecedent, and revisiting "The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down."
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- [00:02]
Bob Garfield
Protesters, rioters, domestic terrorists, insurrectionists. I want to call them rioters or mobsters.
- [00:09]
Brooke Gladstone
As cable news hosts watched the chaos in the Capitol, they struggled to describe what they saw. From WNYC in New York, this is ON THE media. I'm Brooke Gladstone.
- [00:19]
Bob Garfield
And I'm Bob Garfield. Also on this week's show, can a nation ever really move past its past?
- [00:27]
Kimberly Williams Crenshaw
When people say we're better than this, I'm often wondering, so what history have you not read about American society?
- [00:35]
Brooke Gladstone
Plus how the myth of the Confederate Lost Cause has been fought over in a song written by a Canadian.
- [00:43]
Caroline Janney
Songs never really belong entirely to the person who writes them. There's always this very complex negotiation between, you know, audience and composer.
- [00:54]
Bob Garfield
It's all coming up after this. Since Donald Trump reassumed office, over 200 lawsuits have been filed against his administration. Firings, tariffs, immigration, climate policy. It's hard to keep track of and even harder to understand. I'm former U.S. attorney Preet Bharara, and on my podcast, Stay Tuned with Preet, I'm joined by experts to break down complex legal stories and cut through the noise of this administration. It may feel tempting to tune out, but now more than ever, we need to stay engaged, search and follow. Stay tuned with Preet wherever you listen.
- [01:30]
Brooke Gladstone
From WNYC in New York, this is ON the media. I'm Brooke Gladstone.
- [01:34]
Bob Garfield
And I'm Bob Garfield. A shocking week and a shocking presidency have finally come to an end. But there is shock and there is surprise. And come on, were we not warned by Trump himself, even at the very dawn of his administration, we assembled here today are issuing a new decree to be heard in every city, in every foreign capital, and in every hall of power. From this day forward, a new vision will govern our land. Many such decrees issued forth, often in the form of unlawful executive orders. Unlawful because no president may flout federal statute or the Constitution merely by declaring his will. That he was unaware or indifferent to those relatively few constraints on presidential power was clear even earlier in his July 2016 acceptance speech for the Republican nomination. Nobody knows the system better than me, which is why I alone can fix it. And thus, he envisioned his presidency with the see no evil backing of Republicans in Congress. But ultimately, one might say, at long last, the courts and the majority of voters, and even finally, his congressional lapdogs, tired of it. Trump was not vanquished by any deep state or socialist agenda or rigged voting machines or antifa or even fake news. He and he alone was done in, ironically enough, by his very own weapon of mass obstruction Fear. Not fear of the various others whom he has vilified as threats to our democracy, but fear of what his own demagoguery now has unleashed. All of us here today do not want to see our election victory stolen by emboldened radical left Democrats, which is what they're doing. And stolen by the fake news media.
- [03:44]
Brooke Gladstone
That was Wednesday morning.
- [03:45]
Bob Garfield
We will never give up. We will never concede. It doesn't happen. You don't concede when there's theft involved. Our country has had enough. We will not take it anymore. And that's what this is all about.
- [03:59]
Brooke Gladstone
And he sent the followers he'd been summoning for weeks down Pennsylvania Avenue with a final blast of invigorating bitterness.
- [04:09]
Bob Garfield
But just remember this. You're stronger, you're smarter, you've got more going than anybody. And they try and demean everybody having to do with us. And you're the real people. You're the people that built this nation. The government did this to us.
- [04:25]
Caroline Janney
We were normal, good, law abiding citizens, and you guys did this to us.
- [04:29]
Bob Garfield
We want our country back. We are protesting for our freedom right now.
- [04:33]
Brooke Gladstone
That's the cable news hosts struggled over what to call them.
- [04:37]
Bob Garfield
Yeah, a lot of these. And I don't want to call them protesters anymore. I want to call them rioters or mobsters.
- [04:43]
Early James
They. They're going to be arrested.
- [04:44]
Bob Garfield
They have video of these rioters, these mobsters.
- [04:48]
Brooke Gladstone
Wolf, I don't think that means what you think it means.
- [04:51]
Bob Garfield
Domestic terrorists, insurrectionists.
- [04:54]
Brooke Gladstone
Don Lemon started to zero in while Anderson Cooper went with the whole set.
- [04:59]
Bob Garfield
Why were protesters, rioters, insurrectionists, domestic terrorists able to penetrate the Capitol like this?
- [05:07]
Brooke Gladstone
Fox's Brett Baer thought it out.
- [05:09]
Bob Garfield
We said protesters earlier, but that's not accurate for the folks who went inside and did damage inside the Capitol. Those are extrem on this.
- [05:19]
Brooke Gladstone
Standing with Joe Biden.
- [05:21]
Early James
This is not dissent.
- [05:22]
Bob Garfield
It's disorder. It's chaos. It borders on sedition.
- [05:27]
Brooke Gladstone
Was all this intended to inspire terror or to obstruct, even overthrow the government? Or was it just a protest gone off the rails? We know some of the actors, white nationalists, QAnon believers, and dead enders seen at other showdowns. We also know there's no evidence pointing to antifa. We know, too, that much of the Capitol police were overwhelmed by the speed of the attack and the distribution of the breach points. Evidence of some coordination and training. So it wasn't just a mob. And that's why the choice of words is so crucial. Unless we can describe it, we won't be ready. Next time. And there is a next time. January 17, noon at the Washington Memorial and at every state Capitol. These people talked to each other online. Meanwhile, the chief of the Capitol police and the House and Senate sergeants at arms resigned under pressure for what may be rank incompetence or worse. The newly minted acting secretary of defense denied resources requested by the mayor of Washington despite ample warning of mayhem. And as lawmakers cowered behind barricades after the breach, he reportedly went AWOL for at least 90 minutes while Maryland's governor was trying to get him on the phone for authorization to send in reinforcements. It's a puzzle missing many pieces, but the picture so far isn't good. I just have one question. C SPAN doesn't screen its calls, so we can't know if this caller is authentic.
- [07:15]
Early James
I wanted to know if my president.
- [07:17]
Brooke Gladstone
Lied to me today.
- [07:19]
Bob Garfield
And if he did, I want him to tell me. And more importantly, I want him to.
- [07:24]
Early James
Tell the family of the woman that got shot and killed today.
- [07:29]
Bob Garfield
I voted for him. I voted for him.
- [07:37]
Brooke Gladstone
I'm sorry.
- [07:39]
Bob Garfield
No congressional audit is ever going to convince these voters, particularly when the president will continue to say that the election was stolen. The best way we can show respect for the voters who are upset is by telling them the truth.
- [08:02]
Brooke Gladstone
Mitt Romney earned himself a bipartisan round of applause on the Senate floor because he hit on the Senate central dilemma and served up a high minded illusion of a solution. If only it were so simple. We can't just stem the flow of lies. We also have to send truths flooding over innumerable dams and we just haven't been able to do it. We still do have the ability though to hold lawbreakers accountable if we choose. Maybe that's how we start. Consequences, at least for law breaking lies from the bottom to the very top. Cuff em and take em downtown.
- [08:54]
Bob Garfield
Coming up, the romance and revisionism in the lost cause.
- [08:59]
Brooke Gladstone
This is on the media.
- [09:02]
Bob Garfield
Since Donald Trump reassumed office, over 200 lawsuits have been filed against his administration. Firings, tariffs, immigration, climate policy. It's hard to keep track of and even harder to understand. I'm former US Attorney Preet Bharara and on my podcast, Stay tuned with Preet. I'm joined by experts to break down complex legal stories and cut through the noise of this administration. It may feel tempting to tune out, but now more than ever, we need to stay engaged. Search and follow Stay tuned with Preet wherever you listen.
- [09:32]
Brooke Gladstone
This is on the media. I'm Brooke Gladstone.
- [09:35]
Bob Garfield
And I'm Bob Garfield. What did we see in Wednesday's rampage, we saw grievance, indignation. We saw seething, vengeful people who believed that something was stolen from them. And again and again we saw the Confederate battle flag, the stain of the.
- [09:55]
Caroline Janney
Confederate flag inside the Capitol building. That image projected across the world in.
- [10:00]
Early James
The Capitol building never got there back in the 1800s.
- [10:04]
Bob Garfield
The hangman's noose on the western front of the Capitol Hangman's Noose President Donald Trump has embarked on a lost cause akin to that embraced by Southerners after the Confederacy was crushed. That was Democracy Now's Amy Goodman on her podcast, drawing a parallel that has also been seized upon by the New York Times, Washington Post, Rolling Stone and others that we have been here before in the narrative of the former Confederacy that successfully reframed a war for slavery into a noble defense of sovereignty and the Southern way of life. Caroline Janey is a historian of the Civil War at the University of Virginia. She's tracked the evolution of Lost Cause mythology, a process, she says, that began with the beatification of dead rebels.
- [10:56]
Early James
Cemeteries were the place that we first see the utterances of what came to be known as the Lost Cause. And in some ways this makes perfect sense. Of course, these people were grieving for their husbands and fathers and sons, and yet they used those opportunities to have speeches that condemned Reconstruction, that condemned emancipation, that talked about the horrible things that were going to follow in the wake of emancipation and Union victory, and they began casting these things into stone.
- [11:30]
Bob Garfield
By what process did the funereal hagiography morph into the full blown Lost Cause mythology that persists to this day?
- [11:41]
Early James
By the time we get to the 1880s, 1890s, these monuments are going up. We also have the memoirs, the diaries that are being published by former Confederates explaining and justifying the slave holding South. Harkening back to in their minds a golden era of race relations under slavery, they spout the myth that African Americans were content and happy in slavery. We also see this in children's textbooks. The United Daughters of the Confederacy, in particular, wage a war in the classrooms to make sure that children are learning that the war was not about slavery, that it was about states rights, all of those things about the so called faithful slave, the heroes such as Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson, that happens in classrooms as much as it happens in monumentation. And so several generations of young schoolchildren come of age hearing these stories. It's no wonder that we end up with the likes of people like Strom Thurmond. They're raised on the stories of the.
- [12:42]
Bob Garfield
Lost Cause and thence into conventional wisdom and even popular culture like Hollywood.
- [12:50]
Early James
Absolutely. So we see this certainly in Birth of a Nation, which premiered in 1915. The movie itself was a cinematic masterpiece in terms of the technology, but the story that it told was one of white Northerners and white Southerners coming together to defeat the. The so called black beast rapist and all those horrible things that had been unleashed by Reconstruction and by Union policies of emancipation and giving African American men the right to vote. So we see that take to the silver screen. But equally as powerful in 1939, we have gone with the Wind, which is absolutely an embodiment of the Lost Cause.
- [13:32]
Bob Garfield
As God is my witness, they're not going to lick me.
- [13:36]
Brooke Gladstone
I'm going to live through this. And when it's all over, I'll never be hungry again. No.
- [13:42]
Early James
All of those images that we have of fair Southern belles and the faithful slave Mammy encapsulates that image of loyal, faithful African Americans who knew their place, who didn't challenge the strictures of segregation.
- [13:58]
Bob Garfield
Oh, now, Miss Scarlett, you come on and be good and eat just a little. No, they weren't chattel. They were members of the family.
- [14:06]
Early James
Absolutely. And what's really important to remember is that this is something that is imbibed by the entire nation. And so we start seeing white Northerners who a generation before had very much rejected the Lost Cause. By the time we get to Margaret Mitchell's version of the Confederacy, we see white Americans as a whole drinking this in. And the Lost Cause becomes national in response in many ways to the Civil rights movement. We start to see that Confederate banner being used in more popular ways. We see it waved at football games at University of Mississippi and Alabama. We see the University of Mississippi having Colonel Reb as its mascot. People will cast it off as just a symbol, but it's an incredibly powerful symbol that is pulled out for these specific social, cultural and political reasons of resisting desegregation, of resisting enfranchisement.
- [15:02]
Bob Garfield
And beneath that banner, Jim Crow, the kkk, voter suppression and lynchings.
- [15:09]
Early James
Right. The Klan in particular, by the time we get to the 1950s and 1960s, they are using the Confederate battle flag as their emblem.
- [15:17]
Bob Garfield
What are the parallels between the stop the Steal narrative and the myth of the Confederacy?
- [15:25]
Early James
The cause of voter fraud that it was an illegitimate victory in is not unlike what we see former Confederates saying when they talk about that they could have never won against insurmountable Union forces. We start to see that same language from Trump and his followers.
- [15:42]
Bob Garfield
There's never been a time like this where such a thing happened, where they could take it away from all of us, from me, from you, from our country.
- [15:50]
Early James
There was no way we could have won because the odds were stacked against us.
- [15:54]
Bob Garfield
But it's also the sense of victimization and martyrdom in this case. If we are to believe Trump and his MAGA followers at the hands of mythical radical socialists, the Deep State antifa, anti Christians and so on, it all rings so familiar.
- [16:16]
Early James
It does. This is much of the same language, or at least the same ways in which former Confederates were talking about abolitionists, that they were the ones who were this far radical group that had instigated, and they were overturning all of the deeply held values of American society. And so it's the people on the far left that are seen as the real threat to American democracy who are then demonized by those who have been defeated.
- [16:45]
Bob Garfield
Okay, now, on this show, journalist and fellow scholar Corey Robin has warned of Histor Vox, a tendency to launder journalistic hot takes through history, resulting too often in reductive comparisons and ultimately the misunderstanding of the present. Now, we've been speaking of parallels between the Lost Cause and Trumpian mythology, but you, too have some words of caution.
- [17:14]
Early James
Certainly, when I'm talking about this Lost Cause that Trump is spouting, it's not the same as the Confederate Lost Cause. No. There are some of the same symbols, and there is certainly a lot of the same strategy and some of the same language that's being used. But we do have to be very careful. I think we need to use the past to help us understand how and why things played out as they do. But it is absolutely not only dangerous, but it's dishonest to try to make them cookie cutter. One of the really important distinctions to point out here is that Confederates knew they lost and they were trying to justify that defeat. They justified it in all sorts of distorted ways that are continuing to have tremendous effects on our lived experience today. But there's a difference between accepting defeat and not accepting defeat. So that's where this breaks down a great deal.
- [18:18]
Bob Garfield
Fair enough. I should say, though, that in our meetings on the media, we sometimes get a little historavoxy. And in this case, we spent a lot of time discussing the notion of uncanny parallels, and we considered a different way of framing it. Not parallel lines, but perhaps the contemporary extension of the existing Lost Cause narrative. The same line rooted in white supremacy, grievance and oppression. Not Lost Cause redux, but Lost Cause made over. Do you buy that?
- [18:55]
Early James
I'm not sure I do, because the Lost Cause grew out of what white Southerners who supported the Confederacy believed was a legitimate attempt at Confederate nationhood. It grew out of 200 years plus of chattel slavery, a system that led to real set of ideologies and beliefs. And I'm not so certain that we have that same crystallization in what is going on now with Trump supporters and Trumpism. There is a way in which the past is being reimagined for purposes of political gains and social and cultural gains. But I'm not sure that this is a direct growth out of the Confederate Lost Cause.
- [19:48]
Bob Garfield
Well, I certainly wouldn't want to trivialize slavery by making glib comparisons. But is not white supremacy itself a fully comparable ideology that joins the these two periods of history?
- [20:06]
Early James
It does, but white supremacy doesn't just come from the Confederacy. I'm not saying Confederates weren't white supremacists. Please don't get me wrong there. But America as a whole was built on a belief in white supremacy. It's a national phenomena. And I think we need to take a more holistic approach of understanding that this small c conservative defense of white often male prerogative comes from a much larger and deeper well than just the four years that constituted the Confederacy.
- [20:44]
Bob Garfield
Carrie, thank you.
- [20:46]
Early James
Thank you.
- [20:47]
Bob Garfield
Caroline Janey is a professor of history at the University of Virginia. If historic parallels about white resentment and violence have some use in understanding Trumpism and other expressions of white supremacy, the they may also help us to figure out what to do or not to do next. For instance, Republican Senator Ted Cruz thinks there are lessons in the contested election of 1876, when Southern Democrats, then the party of slavery, alleged fraud in the election of Rutherford B. Hayes. Hayes and his Republican Party, however, alleged massive voter suppression of Southern blacks. And so Cruz told his Senate colleagues Wednesday night in his attempt to delay certification of Biden's election victory, why not do what his 19th century predecessors did? This Congress appointed an electoral commission to examine claims of voter fraud. Five House members, five senators, five Supreme Court justices examined the evidence and rendered a judgment. They sure did. But nobody in Congress paid the slightest bit of attention, resulting in a slapdash compromise on the advent of inauguration, in which Southern senators withdrew their electoral objections so long as Hayes withdrew federal troops from the former slave states. The Compromise of 1877 meant Hayes got his presidency and the Old south regained the freedom to oppress black Americans without federal intervention interference. White Southerners called it redemption. To Kimberly Williams Crenshaw, executive director of the African American Policy Forum. It was a catastrophe of appeasement and an object lesson in the politics of reconciliation.
- [22:37]
Kimberly Williams Crenshaw
To some extent, there might be vague awareness that the disputed election ended Reconstruction, but I think people don't have a sense of what that means. It meant that without federal troops supporting the legitimately elected governments of these Southern states, that white terrorism, counter democratic impulses were going to rule the day. What that meant was countless people being killed in political violence. There were coups across the South. This is part of our history. When people say, well, we're better than this, I'm often wondering, so what history have you not read?
- [23:20]
Bob Garfield
So comes now the question, with history as our guide, what to do about our current divide? As recently as three weeks ago, amid Stop the Steal violence across the country, the President elect pledged to foster reconciliation. And now it's time to turn the page, as we've done throughout our history, to unite to heal. What you wrote is, quote, biden's unrequited national unity overtures to the Trumpist coalition of anti unionists are indeed a sad echo of ghastly overtures from our nation's past. A long running dystopian fantasy that tens of millions are willing to fight over. Right impulse, wrong strategy.
- [24:05]
Kimberly Williams Crenshaw
Oh, I would say wrong strategy and wrong impulse. I think the impulse comes from the idea that there is a legitimate grievance here and the only problem is the tactics that are used to express that grievance. The reconciliation between the north and the south after the treasonous acts of the Confederacy, declaring war effectively against the United States was at the end of the day, tapped down to men of honor defending what they believe to be their way of life. So in that reconciliation is in no harm, no foul judgment on the most deadly war to ever consume the United States. In that instinct to try to put the family back together again, those African Americans who sacrificed everything to support the Union were thrown under the bus. What's so worrisome to students of that history right now is that we are seeing the same kind of treasonous actions being framed as just a difference of opinion that we can kind of work out by negotiating. Well, you cannot negotiate with white supremacy. That white supremacy has got to be dealt with directly, without excuse, without compromise. And that frankly, given the fact that President Biden now has a Democratic Congress because of African American voters because of this history. So it would be irony indeed, at the end of the day if he negotiated the very terms of possibility that put him in the position that he's currently in.
- [26:01]
Bob Garfield
You don't think Kumbaya Reach across the aisle, reach across the barricades. Approach is likely to serve this nation very well.
- [26:11]
Kimberly Williams Crenshaw
No more than I thought that a Kumbaya moment would have been the solution to the Confederacy firing on Fort Sumter. Some things are non negotiable in a democratic republic. The idea that there are some people and some rights and some interests that are more important than others based just on who they are is an idea that was repudiated by the 13th and the 14th and the 15th amendment. Unfortunately, that repudiation had an expiration date on it. It was 1876 and we are now living in its aftermath.
- [26:50]
Bob Garfield
Historian Caroline Janney, who we spoke to earlier, was cautious to draw a distinction between the original Lost Cause and Trump's use of the same symbols and tactics. She noted, for example, that the white nationalism undergirding the original Lost Cause myth has a regional identity. It was a thing of the South. The white nationalism of Stop the Steal is more amorphous. Is there a point at which the Lost Cause analogy fails?
- [27:25]
Kimberly Williams Crenshaw
At a certain point, Lost causism did become more of a national understanding, with the framing of Reconstruction as having been a tremendous failure because it embraced the idea of multiracial democracy. That became an idea that the north agreed to as much as the south as a cause of disorder as a reason to be worried about allowing black people in particular to exercise power when they are not, quote, unquote, unquote ready for it. So I think actually one of the things that has to be corrected is the idea that this was just a conceit of the South. This was something that was affirmed and facilitated by the north and eventually by many political elites. That's the legacy, the fact that there wasn't contestation about these ideas. That's what's so frightening about this moment.
- [28:22]
Bob Garfield
I noticed that Mitch McConnell, the Senate majority leader and longtime Trump enabler, condemned Wednesday's events as, quote, a failed insurrection. But, you know, another possibility is that it wasn't a failed insurrection, that it will live on as a symbol of patriotic heroism. If you had to guess, day of.
- [28:46]
Kimberly Williams Crenshaw
Reckoning, not a day of reckoning at all. There is this concept in constitutional law about how the fruit of the poison tree should not be allowed to shape legal outcomes. I would say, do we apply the fruit of the poisonous tree to Mitch McConnell and to the Republicans? Are they making any kind of promise to no longer eat from said poisonous tree? That would be a reckoning. If there is an awareness that we played with fire and it has singed our republic, so we are going to have to tap the fired down and out, which would mean we will no longer allow the party to use these illegitimate grievances to generate the kind of energy that says if we can't rule the Republic, we're going to burn it down. Are they willing to repudiate and no longer use this dangerous weapon in politics? That, to me would be a reckoning. That to me would be the only condition upon which it would make sense to me to think that there is a possibility of reaching across, shaking hands and agreeing that we will no longer go down this path. I don't see that happening right now.
- [30:08]
Bob Garfield
As we're talking about Biden and his impulse and you know more about this history than I do. But it does sound like just a revisiting of the Fugitive Slave act, which Abraham Lincoln countenanced in order to appease the south, or the Dred Scott decision, that historically calamitous Supreme Court decision, neither of which prevented, let's say, the Civil War.
- [30:37]
Brooke Gladstone
Yes.
- [30:38]
Kimberly Williams Crenshaw
So you can't see me. My head is nodding furiously. The Dred Scott opinion was basically a Southern dream come true. We don't have to worry about the courts intervening at all in slavery because Dred Scott decided that black people will never be citizens of the United States. That was a gift to the South. That wasn't enough to appease them. The Fugitive Slave act was a gift to the South. And talk about state rights. This was an act that basically said free states really had no authority to protect their citizens from being captured, whether slave or free, and taken to the south and sold. And that still was not enough. I think what we have to look at is what allowed the south to believe that notwithstanding all of these efforts to appease them, they had the right to open fire on the United States and secede. That underlying dynamic is a dynamic that we need to understand very well before we move into another moment of appeasement, because that appeasement is probably only encourages more of this treasonous kind of behavior than taps it down.
- [32:03]
Bob Garfield
Kimberly, thank you so much.
- [32:05]
Kimberly Williams Crenshaw
Thank you for having me.
- [32:06]
Bob Garfield
Kimberly Williams Crenshaw is co founder and executive director of the African American Policy Forum.
- [32:14]
Brooke Gladstone
Coming up, strike up the band.
- [32:16]
Bob Garfield
This is on the media. Since Donald Trump reassumed office, over 200 lawsuits have been filed against his administration. Firings, tariffs, immigration, climate policy. It's hard to keep track of and even harder to understand. I'm former US Attorney Preet Bharara and on my podcast, stay tuned with Preet, I'm joined by experts to break down complex legal stories and cut through the noise of this administration. It may feel tempting to tune out, but now more than ever, we need to stay engaged, Search and follow Stay tuned with Preet wherever you listen, this is on the media. I'm Bob Garfield.
- [33:01]
Brooke Gladstone
And I'm Brooke Gladstone. When it comes to art identified with the lost cause of the Confederacy the Night they Drove Old Dixie down by the Band, maybe pop culture's most celebrated and misunderstood contribution.
- [33:19]
Bob Garfield
Virgil Cain is the name and I served on the Danville train Till Stonewall's cavalry came and tore up the tracks again in the winter of 65 we were hungry, just barely alive by May 10, Richmond had fell It's a time.
- [33:45]
Early James
I remember oh so well.
- [33:49]
Bob Garfield
The night they Drove Old Dixie down and the bell.
- [34:01]
Brooke Gladstone
The song is rock and roll canon, listed as one of the best of all time by Time magazine and Rolling Stone despite its charged subject matter.
- [34:12]
Bob Garfield
Back with my wife in Tennessee when one day she called to me, Virgil Quick, come see there go Robert E. Lee.
- [34:29]
Brooke Gladstone
On paper these verses read as if lifting from the Lost Cause playbook a nostalgic retelling of the end of the Civil War seen through the eyes of a downtrodden southern farmer laden with grief but not a trace of white supremacy. But the song is not what it seems, or at least what it seemed when it was first loosed upon the world. The band's lead guitarist, Robbie Robertson, a Canadian, hadn't logged much time in the south when he penned the Night They Drove Old Dixie down in 1960, but in the ensuing decades some have claimed it as a neo Confederate anthem. I do want to say before we start the song, it's kind of a scary song to play in today's political climate. I guess that's Early James, a 27 year old Alabama born country musician speaking before performing at an annual star studded tribute concert for the band livestreamed in August. I felt the need to revise some lyrics to make it a little more palatable. And I hope we piss off the right people by changing those words. Inspired by this summer's racial reckoning, James sang about toppling Confederate monuments. Here's how he recasts the chorus of the Night They Drove Old Dixie down.
- [35:53]
Caroline Janney
It'S time to remember, time to bid farewell.
- [35:57]
Brooke Gladstone
He sang tonight we tried Old Dixie.
- [36:00]
Bob Garfield
Down.
- [36:04]
Brooke Gladstone
In Slate, Pop critic Jack Hamilton wrote about the mixed messages in a song that is more and also less than it seems.
- [36:13]
Caroline Janney
Thanks so much for having me, Brooke.
- [36:15]
Brooke Gladstone
Okay, so the song came out in the fall of 69. That was a big time for Folky, rootsy, bluesy type music. Creedence Clearwater Revival released Proud Mary and Bad Moon Rising and Born on the Bayou that same year. You know, maybe it was an effort to kind of grok more, quote, authentic life experience than could be had in the suburbs.
- [36:40]
Caroline Janney
Yeah, I think that that's, you know, an accurate way of putting it. Woodstock is 1969. Altamont is at the end of 1969. And there is an idea in that kind of high 60s moment of popular music as a way back into a sort of authenticity. And certainly a group like the Band, even though they were mostly Canadian, were very, very interested in the roots of American music and this kind of mythic idea of the American past, which explains.
- [37:07]
Brooke Gladstone
Their association with Bob Dylan, who was on the same journey.
- [37:11]
Caroline Janney
Yeah, the Band really come to prominence as the backup band for Bob Dylan in the mid-1960s. And certainly Dylan himself is very interested in these ideas of American history and sort of mythic Americana.
- [37:26]
Brooke Gladstone
Let's also talk about what was going on politically in 69, Washington, D.C. hosted the largest anti war protest in U.S. history in the wake of the assassination of Martin Luther King. In 68, President Johnson signs the Fair Housing act, also known as the Civil Rights Act.
- [37:45]
Caroline Janney
Yeah. And, you know, a lot of musicians saw their work as having a sort of political resonance. There certainly was a big linkage in this era of the popular music of the day as being a soundtrack to certain activist movements.
- [38:01]
Brooke Gladstone
Now, Joan Baez covered the song in 1971.
- [38:07]
Early James
Like my father before me I'm a.
- [38:12]
Bob Garfield
Working man and like my brother before.
- [38:16]
Early James
Me I took a rebel stand well, he was just 18 proud and brave But a Yankee laid him in his grave.
- [38:29]
Brooke Gladstone
I'm guessing that she didn't see the song as mourning the Confederacy, but as an expression of class consciousness and as you note in your piece, perhaps a protest against the conscription of poor and marginalized young men into fighting a war, the Vietnam War, that affluent people could get out of.
- [38:54]
Caroline Janney
Yeah. Joan Baia is obviously someone who is iconically associated with various protest movements of the 1960s, both, you know, the civil rights movement and also the anti war movement. I do think that Baez probably heard in the song the idea. Yeah. Of a young man being conscripted into this war machine and the devastation that is wrought by that. The Civil War in American history is the first real modern war that America fights. And one of the aspects of that is its class ramifications. And that the Civil War was famously referred to by many people who fought in it as a rich man's war. And a poor man's fight. You could buy your way out of military service if you were an upper class person in the 19th century on both sides, I believe. And this is something that absolutely comes up, you know, in the Vietnam era, we could name many prominent United States politicians who got out of serving in Vietnam because they were basically connected. So I think that the Night They Drove Old Dixie down, in the tradition of kind of fictions of the Confederacy, is drastically different than something like Birth of a Nation or Gone with the Wind, which are coming out of a very different historical moment that are sort of putting the mythology of the Confederacy to a different use.
- [40:11]
Brooke Gladstone
That said, you think the Night They Drove Old Dixie down is kind of a stupid song.
- [40:20]
Caroline Janney
You know, I don't know that I'd go so far as stupid. I mean, I love. I love the band. They are one of my favorite artists of all time. And I think that the performance of it is just exquisite, like so many band performances are. You know, it's beautiful musicianship. Levon Helm, who sings the lead vocal, is just, you know, a gorgeous singer, gives a really great performance. But I do think the song has become a bit overrated. It has a lot of hallmarks of overwrought historical fiction. It's got a lot of cloying specificity in terms of, you know, it almost reads like someone who has a kind of encyclopedia, deep level of Civil War knowledge, which I think is true of Robbie Robertson.
- [41:01]
Brooke Gladstone
I think there may be a generational issue here. I don't think that those of us who hummed along, I was 13 or 14 when it came out. I was a junior high school protester, and I picketed for the rights of Mexican immigrant laborers. I don't think we saw the Civil War back then as living history the way that we do now.
- [41:24]
Caroline Janney
I think that that's true, and I think our kind of collective memory and our collective interpretation of the events of the Civil War in 2020 or 2021 is drastically different than where it was in 1960. And that has to do with a sea change in the sort of historiography of the Civil War that had already started happening in the 1960s, but hadn't really trickled its way into popular consciousness yet.
- [41:50]
Brooke Gladstone
Do you think that it may have something to do with the fact that African Americans didn't have access to what was the quote, unquote, mainstream cultural conversation and didn't have the means to influence it?
- [42:05]
Caroline Janney
Yeah, I think that that's absolutely true. By the mid 20th century, telling the history of the Civil War and its aftermath had become really the province of kind of cadre of southern white historians who were very, very invested in the Lost Cause narrative, in the idea that Reconstruction had been a failure. Reinvigoration of this sort of myth of Confederate virtue and all of the things that comes along with the Lost Cause. And, you know, there had been critiques of this. I mean, one of the most famous is in 1935, W.E.B. du Bois published a massive book called Black Reconstruction in America. One of the most famous formulations he puts forward is this idea that the function of white supremacy is to consolidate the power of the ruling class. The ruling class can forge alliances with the white working class that would have normally been outside of the white working class's particular class interests that basically prohibited solidarity between black and white workers. This is now one of the most influential books of American history probably ever written. But at the time, Du Bois was seen as a radical, someone who was not in the club of the people who were tasked with telling the history of the Civil War. So it takes decades for Du Bois work to really get a foothold in academic Civil War historiography.
- [43:31]
Brooke Gladstone
Let's assume that the Canadian lead guitarist of the band and Robbie Robertson probably hadn't read W.E.B. du Bois.
- [43:40]
Caroline Janney
Probably not.
- [43:42]
Brooke Gladstone
His character is Virgil Caine. He's poor.
- [43:46]
Caroline Janney
Mm.
- [43:46]
Brooke Gladstone
His brother was killed in the war. He chops wood to make a living. And the song itself has a dirge like quality. You quote Ta Nehisi Coates saying that the song is just Pharaoh singing the blues.
- [44:05]
Caroline Janney
Yeah, I love that. I love that line from Coates. And it's actually. And this is something I would offer up kind of in praise or defense of the song. I think this song musically is actually extremely complex and nuanced. You know, you mentioned that it does have these dirge like qualities to it. The chorus, on the other hand, is entirely major key. You have this imagery of bells ringing and people singing. Like these are not images that we necessarily entirely equate with mourning.
- [44:52]
Brooke Gladstone
The bells were ringing and the people were singing, arguably because Dixie was defeated.
- [45:00]
Caroline Janney
Right. Yeah.
- [45:01]
Brooke Gladstone
Virgil Caine suffered. But what he describes could be seen as a major chord event in a very dirge like episode of American history.
- [45:15]
Caroline Janney
Are these voices singing recently liberated, formerly enslaved people? There's a lot of dimensions that you could potentially pull out of this song. I don't think it's a neo Confederate song at all. And I mean, I do think that there's a population of people who hear it that way. And I think that that's a mishearing of the song. But songs never really belong entirely to the person who writes them or the person who performs them. There's always this very complex negotiation between, you know, audience and. And composer and performer. And Rolling Stone's interview with Early James after his revision of the song, his really rewriting of it, he talks about that, you know, about how growing up in Alabama, that this song was heard unambiguously as an anthem of, you know, neo Confederate sentiment and lost cause celebration. Is that entirely Robbie Robertson fault? Absolutely not. He's only got so much agency over how people hear it.
- [46:16]
Brooke Gladstone
I guess that's an argument for staying in your lane.
- [46:21]
Caroline Janney
No, I don't think so.
- [46:22]
Brooke Gladstone
Robbie Robertson described on Sirius Radio in an interview how he came to write the song.
- [46:29]
Bob Garfield
I went from Canada down to the Mississippi Delta. It was, bam. You would go to the restroom, and one said colored and one said white. It was crazy. Now, while I was there, Levon took me over to meet his parents and his father, and he was talking about his growing up and being a cotton farmer, that after the Civil War and everything, they had to change and they had to accommodate these kind of things. And he said to me, I'll tell you right now, the south is going to rise again. And I got chills through me. And so years later, I'm sitting down at the piano and something creeped out of me. And it was a movie about a Southern family in the Civil War from their side. The story of that family trying to write a song that I thought Levon could sing better than anybody in the.
- [47:34]
Caroline Janney
World, which Levan does, you know. Absolutely.
- [47:38]
Bob Garfield
That's all it was.
- [47:39]
Caroline Janney
You know, when a song becomes this popular and this well known, it loses a sense of, you know, strict ownership, I think, and it becomes something that can be repurposed. I mean, the early James example is another example of that. Someone taking this song and rewriting it and, you know, repurposing it for a different context. Like my father before me Though I'll never understand Unlike the others below me who took a rebel stand.
- [48:12]
Bob Garfield
Depraved and.
- [48:13]
Caroline Janney
Proud to enslave I think it's time to laid hating this grave I swear by the mud beneath my feet My limit won't stand no matter how much concrete.
- [48:33]
Brooke Gladstone
After reading your piece, I was really primed for the early James version, but I like songs with unreliable narrators. I think that's why I'm such a fan of Randy Newman, you know.
- [48:48]
Caroline Janney
Right, right. The first line of the song is, virgil Caine is the name. You know, we're made very aware that this is a fictional character. You do lose that aspect, certainly in the early James Version. And yet at the same time, I think there's a reason that he chooses to kind of sacrifice that, which is the fact that I think that in his experience, this is a song where that aspect, the idea that this is either an unreliable narrator or an imperfect narrator, has been lost.
- [49:19]
Bob Garfield
Is lost.
- [49:20]
Caroline Janney
Exactly. And it's become that this guy is a hero, which is not what I think Robbie Robertson intended.
- [49:27]
Brooke Gladstone
So we are in a time of heightened consciousness about the impact of history and the likely creation of a new Lost cause myth about a stolen election. And I just wonder, does a story about a Confederate grunt have a place among us anymore? Or is it more than that?
- [49:53]
Caroline Janney
Yeah, I mean, that's a great question. The context of this song is the Vietnam War, using the metaphor of this one Confederate soldier and his experience to make a statement about sort of war more broadly and the Vietnam War specifically. The Night They Drive Old Dixie down is written over 100 years after the surrender at Appomattox. It's written by a Canadian guy. Like, it's just so far removed in many ways. So, you know, the question then sort of becomes like, is there going to be, you know, if there is something analogous to the Lost Cause with Trump, you know, what's that going to look like 100 years from now down the line? Are people still going to be making art that is, you know, referencing it or somehow steeped in it? I hope not.
- [50:43]
Brooke Gladstone
Thank you very much.
- [50:44]
Caroline Janney
Yeah, thank you.
- [50:46]
Brooke Gladstone
Jack Hamilton is Slate's Pop critic, Associate professor of American and Media Studies at the University of Virginia, and author of Just Around Midnight, Rock and Roll and the Racial Imagination.
- [51:00]
Bob Garfield
Virgil Caine is the name that I serve on the Danville train.
- [51:07]
Kimberly Williams Crenshaw
Till storm.
- [51:08]
Bob Garfield
His cavalry came and tore up the tracks again that's it for this week's show on the Media is produced by Ilana Casanova Burgess, Michael Lowinger, Leah Fetter, John Hanrahan, Eloise Blondio and Rebecca Clark Callender. Zandra Ellen writes our newsletter and our show was edited by Brooke. Our technical director is Jennifer Munson. Our engineers this week were Sam Baer and Josh Hahn.
- [51:35]
Brooke Gladstone
Katya Rogers, our executive producer on the Media, is a production of WNYC Studios. I'm Brooke Gladstone.
- [51:43]
Bob Garfield
And I'm Bob Garfield. Since WNYC's first broadcast in 1924, we've been dedicated to creating the kind of.
- [51:55]
Early James
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- [51:57]
Bob Garfield
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- [51:59]
Caroline Janney
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- [52:02]
Bob Garfield
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