Slate "John Kelly's Warped View of History - Lost Cause"
His white-centric defense of the Confederacy is just as inflammatory as his boss's rhetoric
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/politics/2017/10/john_kelly_echoes_the_president_s_warped_view_of_history.html
by Jamelle Bouie
On Monday night, Chief of Staff John Kelly offered what may be the official White House position on historiography.
“I think we make a mistake as a society ... when we take what is today accepted as right and wrong and go back 100, 200, or 300 years or more and say what Christopher Columbus did was wrong,” Kelly told Laura Ingraham in an interview on Fox News. “Five hundred years later ... it’s inconceivable to me that you would take what we know now and apply it then. It shows you a lack of appreciation for history and what history is.”
It shows a lack of appreciation for history and what history is.
It is true that one of the tasks of history is to understand the past on its own terms, to see the world of our predecessors with their eyes, and to grapple with them as moral agents, with the same capacities—with the same humanity—as ourselves. W.E.B. DuBois captured this in his prologue to Black Reconstruction in America, 1860-1880, when he informed readers that he intended to tell the story of the post–Civil War years “as though Negroes were ordinary human beings”—a challenge to his white contemporaries who often treated them as historical objects for theories of race hierarchy, not humans acting and reacting as humans do.
Kelly clearly believed he was meeting that standard later in the interview, when he offered praise for Robert E. Lee:
I’ll tell you, Robert E. Lee was an honorable man. He was a man who gave up his country to fight for his state, which 150 years ago was more important than country. It was always loyalty to state first back in those days. Now it’s different today. The lack of an ability to compromise led to the Civil War, and men and women of good faith on both sides made their stand, where their conscience had them make their stand.
Most of the backlash to Kelly’s comments centered on that last claim, that the Civil War was a failure to compromise. Writers like Ta-Nehisi Coates of the Atlantic and historians like Adam Rothman of Georgetown University blasted that view, showing how it was compromise that defined the antebellum era—from the Missouri Compromise of 1820 to the Compromise of 1850 to the Kansas–Nebraska Act of 1854—and how those compromises simply deferred the issue of whether the United States would remain “half free and half slave,” to borrow Abraham Lincoln’s words.
snip - much more to read at the link.
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