The Attack on Historical Memory
The Void of Memory Creates an Opportunity for Authoritarians
Adam Serwer's writings, particularly his Atlantic article "The Myth of the Kindly General Lee," expose how post-Civil War historical revisionism served specific political purposes. Serwer demonstrates that Robert E. Lee, far from being the reluctant, honorable general often portrayed in popular history, actively supported slavery and committed brutal acts against enslaved people under his control.
Serwer shows that this revisionism was part of the "Lost Cause" mythology, a deliberate campaign to reframe the Confederacy as a noble defense of states' rights rather than a fight to preserve slavery. This myth-making served to:
Morally rehabilitate the Confederate cause
Justify the violent dismantling of Reconstruction
Provide ideological foundation for Jim Crow segregation
Conversely, figures like Confederate General James Longstreet, who fought for the Confederacy but later supported Reconstruction and Black voting rights, were deliberately erased from Southern heroic mythology. Longstreet's "crime" was choosing reconciliation and a multiracial democracy over continued resistance to equal rights.
Connection to Jim Crow
This historical revision wasn't merely academic, it directly enabled and justified Jim Crow policies. The Lost Cause mythology positioned White Southerners as victims of "Northern aggression" and Reconstruction as an illegitimate punishment, rather than as an attempt to establish racial equality. By mythologizing Confederate leaders while demonizing Reconstruction, the narrative:
Justified disenfranchisement of Black voters as "restoring order"
Framed segregation as the natural social order that had been disrupted
Provided moral cover for racial terrorism through lynching and other violence
The erection of Confederate monuments, many built during Jim Crow's peak, served as physical manifestations of this historical revisionism, reminding Black citizens of who controlled the historical narrative and held power.
Contemporary Relevance to Structural Racism
This pattern of historical revisionism continues to shape contemporary racial inequality in several ways:
Infrastructure and Wealth Distribution: The narrative that the post-Civil War South was solely a victim of Northern aggression obscures how policies during and after Reconstruction systematically prevented Black economic advancement through sharecropping and black codes and convict leasing which facilitated extreme exploitation of Black labor, as well as redlining, and exclusion from the GI Bill and other wealth-building programs.
Criminal Justice System: The post-Reconstruction mythology that portrayed Black political participation as threatening and corrupt helped normalize discriminatory policing and incarceration policies that continue today.
Political Disenfranchisement: Modern voter suppression tactics echo Post-Reconstruction strategies and often rely on similar rhetoric about "election integrity."
Education Systems: The success of Lost Cause mythology in penetrating textbooks and popular understanding continues to shape how Americans understand their history, often minimizing the centrality of slavery and racism to American development.
Connection to Current Political Movements
The attacks on DEI initiatives and Critical Race Theory represent the latest iteration of this historical pattern. By characterizing efforts to address historical inequalities as "divisive" or "un-American," these movements echo how Reconstruction's opponents positioned racial equality as a radical attack on legitimate order rather than as the fulfillment of American ideals.
The MAGA movement's appeals to a mythologized American past follow the Lost Cause playbook, creating a narrative of national decline from a golden age that never existed as described, while obscuring the racial hierarchies that structured that supposed golden age.
Understanding Serwer's analysis helps us recognize that current debates about history aren't merely academic; they're fundamentally about who belongs in the American story and whether we will acknowledge the structural inequalities that continue to shape our society.