The Next Generation

[Hat Tip to Corey Meyer]

If you listen closely you will notice that the entire script is cut and pasted from the internet. Just the same tired and misleading claims about the past. Here is a link to “Defending the Heritage“.  This is a wonderful example of the declining influence of the Lost Cause on our collective memory of the war.

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30 comments… add one
  • Nat Turner's Son Apr 6, 2011 @ 6:10

    I am afraid we will see more stuff like this due to the easy use media tools so many have to day. Kevin you ought to do one yourself and set up a retirement home with the money made. The next 4 years are going to be really interesting and sometimes sad.

    • Kevin Levin Apr 6, 2011 @ 6:12

      I hear you, but in the end I am an optimist. Stay tuned for a post on this very issue.

  • Patrick Lewis Apr 6, 2011 @ 2:55

    Was anyone else completely thrown by the dad/author’s midwestern accent at the end? I was expecting a good ol’ Middle Tennessee drawl after all the talk about defending “us” and “our.”

    Then again, I guess Dixie Outfitters would scold me for not respecting the diversity of the Confederacy then or now.

  • Will Hickox Apr 6, 2011 @ 2:32

    On the subject of using children to memorialize the Confederacy, an item from the Aug. 30, 1906 “National Tribune,” a veteran’s newspaper:

    THEIR FLAG WENT DOWN.
    Joseph Aston, Co. I, — W. Va. Cav., Coweta, I. T., wants to know why, after 42 years, there are more rebel flags to-day than there were at the close of the war. At an Encampment at Oklahoma City last Fall 300 rebel flags were carried by the school children in the parade. The Southern Soldiers were grand, brave and heroic, and it was no fault of theirs that they did not shoot the life out of the Government, but their flag went down, and down it should stay.

    • Andy Hall Apr 6, 2011 @ 3:30

      Yup. Using kids to rile the base over “heritage violations” has been going on a long time.

      Thirteen-year-old Laura [Talbot Galt] was a student at Louisville’s Eighth Ward Public School in 1902 when her eighth grade teacher scheduled a singing recital for the class. The class was instructed to sing “Marching through Georgia”, and Laura wouldn’t hear of it. Laura’s grandmother, a member of the DAR and United Daughters of the Confederacy, advised her grandchild to obey the teacher, but to protest against the sentiment of the song.

      On the night of the recital, Laura stood with her class but refused to sing the song. She stood mute in front of the audience with her fingers in her ears.

  • Woodrowfan Apr 5, 2011 @ 12:03

    He did get one thing right, he writes that he is neither a scholar or a historian. Wow, I can’t argue with that!

    • Carl W. Roden Apr 6, 2011 @ 11:37

      Oh and you are? Really?

      • Kevin Levin Apr 6, 2011 @ 11:48

        But that’s not the point. It’s the claims in the video that are being judged and just about all of them are misleading or simply false.

  • Corey Meyer Apr 5, 2011 @ 10:06

    Let’s be respectful to the kid at least…and I am not saying anyone here is being disrespectful…but we need to remember the kid in the video is being used as a pawn by the father, Robert Mestas. It is not the kids poor research, reading or understanding that is the problem. That shortcoming belongs to his father, and his father alone.

    I actually feel sorry for the kid…not for what he is learning from his father, but that his father felt it was appropriate to use his son in this manner. Maybe it is just me since I have two young boys about the age of the boy in the video and I try to keep them out of this altogether.

    Oh well…so goes the world!

    • Kevin Levin Apr 5, 2011 @ 10:42

      I don’t think anyone here is suggesting that the child is responsible for the content of the video.

      • Corey Meyer Apr 5, 2011 @ 11:29

        Kevin I realize that, but I just think it is sad how the kid is being used in this instance.

        • Kevin Levin Apr 5, 2011 @ 11:30

          Do you believe the father intends to “use” his child?

  • Dan Wright Apr 5, 2011 @ 7:21

    Having a kid in the picture is supposed to mask the content’s shortcomings. This is a listing of Confederate myths by a kid who is unsure about the whole deal. But I wonder how it plays with the SCV demographic.

    • Andy Hall Apr 5, 2011 @ 8:27

      “But I wonder how it plays with the SCV demographic.”

      Probably pretty well; the kid looks just like friggin’ Opie. There’s one well-known Southron heritage site that, when the author wants to refer to traditional, rural Southern virtues, also mentions Mayberry — a fictional town that only existed on a Hollywood backlot, whose law enforcement officers never dealt with really serious violent crime, and where African Americans were almost invisible.

      I suspect this video will play pretty well with that crowd.

      • Brooks Simpson Apr 10, 2011 @ 0:48

        Oh, Mayberry and Mount Pilot are in fact based on several places in North Carolina … Pilot Mountain and Mount Airy. However, Andy is correct in that there does seem to be a little white washing involved in their fictional recreation. Pilot Mountain, for example, has had some KKK issues,

        • Richard Apr 10, 2011 @ 6:15

          Mayberry, Mount Pilot, and the KKK all in one post. Looks like you have been sippin’ on too much haterade professor.

          • Brooks Simpson Apr 10, 2011 @ 8:23

            I’m surprised that someone doesn’t know about the towns on which Mayberry RFD is based or their history. “Haterade”? Just relaying information readily available, plus I know folks who live there (who would laugh at your claim).

            What’s your problem with that? You’re free to try to correct me. Looks to me as if you know you can’t do that, thus the flame.

  • Bob Pollock Apr 5, 2011 @ 4:25

    Oh my, there we go with the “Grant owned slaves” bit again.

    • Kevin Levin Apr 5, 2011 @ 4:39

      Just another day in the world of cut and paste history.

  • JMRudy Apr 5, 2011 @ 3:38

    For anyone tempted to subscribe to his mailing list in return for the “Free Chapter” hoping for an MP3, don’t bother. It’s a PDF and you can get it right here without joining a neo-confederate spam list:

    http://www.defendingtheheritage.com/wp-content/uploads/TheQuestionOfSlavery.pdf

    • Kevin Levin Apr 5, 2011 @ 3:41

      Thanks John. Can’t wait to read it. 🙂

    • Corey Meyer Apr 5, 2011 @ 5:24

      According to the PDF, he started his interest in Princeton, IL., that is just miles from where I work…Interesting. Maybe Mr. Mestas and I can meet up and have a nice discussion someday.

      • Kevin Levin Apr 5, 2011 @ 5:27

        More evidence that this has very little to do with the continuing war between the North and South.

        • Carl W. Roden Apr 6, 2011 @ 11:49

          Uh continuing war between the North and South?

          …………..

          Uh Kevin….I hate to tell you this but….no wait, scratch that, I think I’m going to thoroughly enjoy using this line since it’s often used the other way by some thoroughly ignorant folks, but….are you paying attention? Good….here’s a little detail you may want to know before you embarrass yourself further:

          The War is Over!

          It ended at (depending on who you ask) Appomattox Court House or with the capture of Jefferson Davis, or even with the surrender of the CSS Shenandoah…either way it ended in 1865. As such there is no war between the North and the South, both are currently proud members of the United States of America, each section has its own pride in its history and its reasons for having that pride and deserving of it without condemnation or recrimination.

          Now if you mean “war” as if a verbal debate (such as it is) between how the American Civil War (a term I use only for its general use here) is defined, then I would suggest a better term than war, since it implies one side or the other is out for total victory over the other, and I can tell you from my corner of the debate that is not the case.

          Fact is that neither Northern historians or Southern historians are ever going to come to a consensus on the causes and the war or the manner in which it is remembered….of course that is usually the case in about every country on earth where such wars take place, but to call such a “war” is rather distasteful on your part. Just my two cents.

          • Kevin Levin Apr 6, 2011 @ 12:26

            Carl,

            I honestly don’t know what you are getting at here.

            You said: “Fact is that neither Northern historians or Southern historians are ever going to come to a consensus on the causes and the war or the manner in which it is remembered….of course that is usually the case in about every country on earth where such wars take place, but to call such a “war” is rather distasteful on your part. Just my two cents.”

            I don’t know what point you are making. The historians that I’ve read come from all parts of the country and cannot be divided up so easily by region. For example, how would you classify C. Vann Woodward, who taught at Yale or Ed Ayers, who was raised in Tennessee. In what ways does their place of birth shape their scholarship? Please enlighten me.

    • Andy Hall Apr 5, 2011 @ 5:28

      I followed that link, and now I have a headache, thankyouverymuch.

      But I did learn some additional things that, as the title suggests, I never learned in school. Like that Robert E. Lee was an abolitionist, that Alexander Stephens deemed slavery to be of no great importance to the question of secession, and that Neal Boortz is a respected Civil War historian.

      I recently found a three-years-expired bottle of Vicodin in my desk, prescribed after a root canal procedure I’d had. Reading this excerpt really makes me want to take a chance on those old pills.

      • Kevin Levin Apr 5, 2011 @ 5:30
      • Matthew Donnelly Apr 10, 2011 @ 3:03

        “Our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite idea; its foundations are laid, its corner- stone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery subordination to the superior race is his natural and normal condition” – Alexander Stephens, March 21, 1861
        Sure sounds like the Confederacy was founded for reasons other than slavery doesn’t it? But then I’m just a prejudiced negro-loving Yankee who reads things for what they say.

  • Scott MacKenzie Apr 5, 2011 @ 2:07

    Two things stand out for me when viewing the video and the website. It appears to be a one-man operation judging by the low production values and low cost of the CD ($10 plus s/h) – I guess iTunes wouldn’t take it. I think that the author is trying to make some easy money off of neo-Confederates’ sense of heritage. Yes, it’s come to that.

    • Kevin Levin Apr 5, 2011 @ 2:47

      Well, whatever the case may be it’s pretty bad. There is a sense that this guy is exploiting the memory of the Confederate cause for financial gain.

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