Let's Lose the Lost Cause

I know well how the South Carolina State House, and more recently its grounds, look with the Confederate battle flag flying over it. I grew up in the path of Sherman’s March through South Carolina in what is now part of Rev. Clementa Pinckney’s senate district. During Jimmy Carter’s presidency and the prime time era of the “Dukes of Hazzard” I learned the basic tenets of the Lost Cause. The Confederacy had been a noble failure, it held, one that demonstrated the martial virtues of southern soldiers and their officers; but the Cause came up short due to the industrial and man-power advantages held by the Union. 

Funny that slavery wasn’t mentioned. It would be inaccurate to say that I learned that slavery had no role in the causes for the war, because slavery only came up as a result of the war.

While boys outside the South debated the merits of Ken Stabler versus Terry Bradshaw I remember sitting in a lean-to fort in the woods behind a friend’s house arguing over how Robert E. Lee could have won at Gettysburg. Being raised in that distinctively native southern white mindset leaves a mark, and it is difficulty to unlearn faith in the myth of the Lost Cause. That unlearning is what many white southerners must do. 

Studying history helped me unlearn the Lost Cause, but I also unlearned it by watching others perform the rituals of it. In college I saw how members of one southern fraternity held annual balls where all the members dressed as dandified Confederate officers. Almost none of them would have had ancestors who rose above enlisted rank, I realized, and what they were doing was using memory of the war to define themselves as special, important, and leaders in the present. By implication they mattered more than other southerners who were black or poor.

The image of the Confederate ancestor in the southern mind is central to the Lost Cause problem. Those who know (or at least assume) they had ancestors who fought imagine them as a younger version of Robert E. Lee or Stonewall Jackson: lean, handsome, serious-minded and brave men with a fervent belief in Confederate nationalism, States’ Rights, and protecting their homes.

No doubt that image fits some soldiers, but relatively few. By 1862 the first conscription act for the Confederacy in April of 1862 established the draft and, it extended all one-year volunteer commitments to three years. The government had already begun to run out of volunteers who would sign-up for their cause and man its armies and it had to put in a stop-loss to insure the original volunteers didn’t leave. Moreover, the draft had to be violently upheld with Home Guard units — a potent reminder that the entire economic and social structure of the South rested on violence. Make no mistakes, the Confederacy not only supported violence to preserve slavery; it also used it violence to force non-slave owners to fight.

Do those holding fast to the myth consider that at least one in ten of their Confederate veteran ancestors deserted?

I knew from childhood that I had ancestors who served. At least one was drafted and another ancestor died of wounds defending Charleston. More recently I have learned of others, though, who were Unionists. Official affidavits say other relatives hid from the draft by living on little islands in the swamps. I can’t see how flying the Battle Flag honors them. 

The Lost Cause myth whitewashes all of those parts of southern heritage just as it conveniently forgot the thousands of African American Marylanders taken into slavery by Lee’s invading army in 1862.

Alabama took down the Battle flag with no fanfare. Wal-Mart, eBay and other outlets for commerce gave it up with corporate memos. South Carolina has done it through the legislative process.

The 150^th anniversary of the end of that cruel war, and now the removal of the battle flag from South Carolina’s state house grounds in reaction to yet more terrorism against African Americans is the right time to bury our Lost Cause fantasies too.

Farm to Table Pasta

April 1, 2015  

Wellington County, Kansas

Walking in the winter wheat fields of Sumner County, Kansas, the wheat capital of the United States, may not have the amber waves of grain so important in “America the Beautiful” much longer. Richard Barrett, a thirty-year veteran of wheat farming has 600 acres under till this year and his genetically modified organism (GMO) crop looks promising. If he starts to bring it to market next week as planned, it will be the first of Explorer Seed’s Wheataroni 3.0, the first field-grown pasta. On Barrett’s acres instead of even rows of wheat kernels little curls of beige dried macaroni peek out from the head of each stalk.

 

A spokesman at the seed trade association noted that this will be a boon for consumers and farmers. “We all love to cut out the middle men. With the emergence of GMO pasta the Noodle Giants – Barilla, Mueller, give way to a more direct relationship of farm to table.” We see real environmental benefits too: less diesel used to haul grain to storage, less electricity to grind, mix and shape wheat for pasta. Kansas Secretary of Agriculture Ed Stewart visited the Barrett farm last week and commented, “This revolutionizes farming. One day our children will say, ‘this is the best thing since field-grown spaghetti!’”

“What good is wheat anyway except as bread or pasta?” Asked Elizabeth Perroni, leader of the team of microbiologists at Explorer who worked on this project since 2002. In an interview Perroni added, “So we thought we would skip some steps for the consumer. We tried to engineer a field-grown muffin but that, that my friend, is the cold fusion of GMO crops.” The stalks couldn’t take the weight and try as we might, repurposing the wheat plant to include bits of cocoa or poppy seeds is phenomenally complex.”  

 

The research team turned to pasta instead of fully baked goods, perhaps recognizing that Americans buy well over two billion dollars’ worth of dried pasta each year. Working with secrecy worthy of a defense contractor, the Pioneer scientists, code named Semolina Team 6, engineered several varieties of durum wheat into some of the simpler past shapes: penne, vermicelli, fusilli, farfalle and alphabets.

The cappelini and spaghetti tended to fall off the husk. The long pastas also broke into small pieces during test harvests using combines. But the shorter and thicker walled shapes proved rugged enough to go from field to combine, through some fan-aided chaff separation, and then right in to a box.

Back on Barrett’s land, the fourth generation Kansas farmer sees this in the sweep of human history: “We domesticated wheat 9,000 years ago and dried commercial pasta only became widely available in the twentieth century, but in the twenty-first century we have simplified this for all man-kind. I feel proud to be a part of it.”