"When I fell behind that line and I saw - I can just remember my breath catching in my throat because what I saw was just a war scene. It was like something I had seen in the Middle East. There were officers on the ground. They were bleeding. They were throwing up. ... I was slipping in people's blood. ... It was hours of hand-to-hand combat." Caroline Edwards, U.S. Capitol Police Officer Injured in the Attack
White-washing United States history isn’t a new or unusual hobby for Americans. It is how Americans prefer to partake of their history, at least many of us. Today as we mark the third year since the storming of the Capitol Building in Washington D.C. on the day that Congress set aside to accept the certified electoral count from the states for the 2020 election, it is important to not only remember that event but to also understand how it is being white-washed and reinterpreted.
Someone somewhere always has a motive and a reason to alter perceptions of our history. The motives are usually political. And in an election year, you can bet your MAGA cap that there is much to be gained by creating a false narrative about that event. Conspiracy theorists are working overtime right now.
But before delving into that arena of falsified and misdirected history, it might be instructive to examine another event that was rewritten and was very successful in changing American’s view of an event. I’m talking about the American Civil War. Depending on what part of the country you live in, your racial affiliation, or your political party affiliation, your children might be getting vastly different versions of that pivotal event in American history.
This is no small matter either. Having an accurate and truthful understanding of the American Civil War is key to understanding many current social, economic, and political conflicts. In other words, to properly understand the Civil War is to inform an understanding of our own time. So, information and misinformation are critical to developing good citizenship in the United States.
But the Civil War is a case study that defies the conventional wisdom that says, “The winners write the history books.” In this case, they didn’t.
In the years shortly after the Civil War ended in 1865, southerners still stung from a staggering defeat, wanted to redeem their cause and purpose. It was in some natural human way, an attempt to “save face.”
By 1866, Edward Pollard, a Virginian, had already published a book called The Lost Cause. It was the first use of that term. In addition, ideas of The Lost Cause began to emerge from “Ladies Memorial Associations” and men’s veteran's groups in the late 1860s and initially concerned itself with vindicating the Confederacy against ridicule and accusations of treason that ex-Confederates considered dishonorable.
After the Reconstruction period in the late 1870s, the Lost Cause found new agency and voices of other ex-confederates and Southerners wanted to build a different narrative than the dishonorable one that pinned blame on the South for the institution of slavery. The United Daughters of the Confederacy (founded in 1894) eventually became the chief propagators of the Lost Cause, but Confederate veterans, authors, academic historians, politicians, public historians, business leaders, and cultural producers all contributed to its life. This narrative also served to support the growing white supremacist Jim Crow system being erected in southern states.
Essentially the Lost Cause reframed and redefined the Civil War in a way that has been completely debunked and disputed by historians today. But these ideas still shade and confuse this issue for most Americans. Those ideas included at a minimum the following:
Cultural and constitutional differences—not a singular interest in preserving slavery—forced the slaveholding states to secede. In other words, slavery was a secondary issue.
Confederate armies, composed of gallant men and brilliant leaders, succumbed not because of poor leadership, sub-par military performance, or battlefield losses, but to overwhelming United States resources. The trifecta of Generals Robert E. Lee, Stonewall Jackson, and Confederate President Jefferson Davis were turned into near gods within a new Southern pantheon of heroes.
It regarded Confederate women as sanctified by wartime sacrifice and identified, in them, perfect examples of gender conformity.
Though ex-Confederates accepted the end of slavery, the Lost Cause maintained that because slavery had been beneficial to black and white people alike, emancipation had been a grave mistake.
Reconstruction had been driven by a vindictive desire to impose a dangerous racial equality on a defeated white South, and the “redemption” of the South by Klan violence and electoral fraud had been a heroic moment in Southern history.
These ideas were reinforced throughout the South through monument building, textbook writing, lectures, sermons, and other means of communication until they had been repeated enough times that they became the accepted narrative of what the Civil War was about. They even affected attitudes in the North, which by the early 20th century was anxious to move beyond any differences over historical interpretation as they turned toward industrial development.
The effectiveness of the Lost Cause narrative can be seen as recently as a 2011 survey conducted by the PEW Research Center. 48%, a plurality of Americans, say it was mainly about states’ rights and just 38% say the Civil War was mainly caused by slavery. Another 9% volunteered that it was about both equally. In this case, the losers of the war won the PR battleground and rewrote history. This has profound consequences.
That is why getting January 6 accurate and correct is critical. This was so recent in our lives that most of us can probably remember that day and what we witnessed happening, in shock and horror. But even in an era where instantaneous video of an event brings it in living color into your home, false narratives and reinterpretations began almost immediately after it was over. These false narratives tried to get Americans to doubt and question what they saw firsthand themselves.
It was an attempted coup and an insurrection to stop the lawful and Constitutional transition of power, peacefully. That is the reality we saw with our own eyes!
But remember? Before that day was even over, some in the MAGA movement were blaming Antifa and Black Lives Matter for the violence. According to the diversion, the white Trump protesters were all calm and peaceful and it was a lovefest among them and the police.
Then it was rewritten to blame Nancy Pelosi because she failed to call the National Guard. The Democrats were to blame, that’s it. It wasn’t Trump, despite what we all saw and heard in his speech at the Ellipse just an hour before. It was the Democrat's fault.
Now, in 2024, it is being sold as a conspiracy that the FBI sanctioned and started. Even though there is absolutely no evidence supporting this conspiracy a full 25% of Americans are buying it today.
A Washington Post-University of Maryland poll found that a quarter of Americans say it is either "definitely or probably true" that federal law enforcement officials instigated the attacks, despite repeated denials and multiple investigations showing no evidence to support the unfounded theory.
Most of us watched the January 6th Congressional Hearings last summer and saw and heard evidence, not conspiracies, about who and how the insurrection began and how Trump himself failed in his duty as commander-in-chief to provide security or attempted to stop his supporters from committing such violence on the Capitol police.
Donald Trump himself, who has a host of reasons why he would love to rewrite the history of that day, is trying to frame it as the act of patriots and people who love this country and not an insurrection. Of course, Trump’s future address and wardrobe might depend on the outcome. So yes, he is trying to reframe it. But it is also a campaign tactic. He claims he will pardon those who have been found guilty by the Courts and claims they are being “persecuted.” MAGA world loves it when he talks like that.
Our national memory of January 6th needs to be grounded and settled in evidence, law, reality, and the assurance that what each of us saw that day is indeed what our consciences are telling us happened. Trump tried to use a mob to stop the certification of Biden’s electoral victory, in a desperate last-ditch attempt to stay in office. It wasn’t the FBI, Nancy Pelosi, Antifa, or Black Lives Matter. It was Trump supporters carrying Confederate flags, Christian images and symbols, and weapons who attacked our Capitol, abused law enforcement officers just trying to do their duty, and Trump was the instigator-in-chief.
We cannot afford to let the undemocratic forces of the MAGA world rewrite this history and try to get it into the American consciousness and mainstream. That is why it is so important that we remember this day. It is an exercise in accurate history and citizenship, standing up for what we know is true.
Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And the process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right.
George Orwell, 1984
Very well written and including George Orwell's quote is apt. All of our text books being printed in Texas may have something to do with the lack of knowledge and critical thinking skills of many in the Trump corner. Linda