A Liberal Dose, June 24, 2021 "Why Do So Many Southerners Not Trust Science?"

 

A Liberal Dose

June 24, 2021

Troy D. Smith

“Why Do So Many Southerners Not Trust Science?”

 

 

A reader who moved into the area a few years ago recently asked if I would use my column to address their question: Why do so many Southerners not believe in science? I decided that I would first turn to an expert in this area, so I asked my colleague from Tennessee Tech, Laura Smith (no relation), who also lives in Sparta. Laura teaches at Tech, and is finishing up her history dissertation for her PhD. I’m going to share with you what she said, then –in probably the next two columns –I will give my take on it.

Laura Smith:

“I’ve been in the classroom teaching about science and medicine for years, and it never fails that each semester a student will ask me why Southerners are so opposed to science.  Like many myths in history, the idea that Southerners are opposed to science is an overgeneralization, but also like many other myths in history, its roots lie not in the past but more in the present.  In my dissertation, I study the founding of medical schools in the nineteenth century American South and deal with that question: were Southerners against medical schools because they were against science?  The answer depends on who you asked, but it has more to do with race and class than it does with being from the South.  African Americans, poor people, and women have historically been the people to suffer most from the ‘progress’ of science and medicine.  They were long victims of experimentation, careless healthcare, and even bodysnatching for instruction in medical schools.  But Southerners in general and especially white males were not enemies of science.  Doctors and lay people largely associated medicine and science with social progress.  Most interestingly, they believed that Southerners needed to study medicine so that they could better understand specifically Southern diseases, and local communities donated large amounts of money to ensuring their success.

So if it’s not true that Southerners have always opposed science, why do so many people think that?  The answer lies not in the distant past but in the twentieth century Scopes trial.  The Scopes trial took place in 1925 in Dayton, Tennessee where a high school teacher by the name of John T. Scopes was tried for violating a recent Tennessee act that banned teaching human evolution in public schools.  Up to this point, most people thought that it was fine to believe both in science and their religious convictions.  But by the early 1900s, media coverage of the fossil evidence for human evolution was growing as was the passion of Christian fundamentalists who believed in a literal as opposed to symbolic interpretation of the Bible.  At the same time, more Southern children were attending public schools for the first time and hearing Darwin’s theories.  Fundamentalists pushed for the act which carried with it the strong implication that any teaching other than creationism was atheistic.  The trial was a spectacle that made money for all involved.  Thus, right here in Tennessee there began a manufactured fight pitting science and Southern religion.  It is a narrative that has been picked up by conservative politicians appealing to Southern voters not to trust scientists to this day.  It’s important to remember that many Christian scientists have argued a reconciliation of evolution and religion by placing God as the controlling force choosing favorable traits that would pass to further generations.  It’s up to you what you believe, but the history of the evolution debate as well as the media coverage of this Southern trial has subconsciously shaded the way we view science and the South ever since.”

I agree with my friend Laura that distrust in science is not specifically a Southern phenomenon.  Or was it, traditionally, a liberal or conservative one –but it has become a conservative one in the 21^st century, not just in the South but all over the country. Why?

Stay tuned.

 

--Troy D. Smith, a White County native, is a novelist and a history professor at Tennessee Tech. His words do not necessarily represent TTU.

 

A complete list of "A Liberal Dose" columns can be found HERE

A list of other historical essays that have appeared on this blog can be found HERE

Author's website: www.troyduanesmith.com

A Liberal Dose, June 17, 2021 "Orwell Said It Best: The New Lost Cause Ideology"

 

A Liberal Dose, June 17, 2021

Troy D. Smith

"Orwell Said It Best: The New Lost Cause Ideology"

This is the conclusion of a three-part discussion- click here to see PART ONE and PART TWO,

I’ve been talking the last couple of times about “Lost Cause Ideology” and the fact that so many 21^st Century Americans don’t want to admit the Civil War was fought over slavery. Another aspect of that, which we’ve been seeing for about the last 25 years or so, is the assertion that thousands of black men volunteered to take up arms and fight in defense of the Confederacy –a claim which historians reject and which is easily disproven. Why, then, has it become so popular the last couple of decades? I’ll give you a hint. The “Black Confederate” memes spiked on twitter during the riots in Ferguson, Missouri in August of 2014.

Here’s the answer: if black people supported the Confederacy, then the Confederacy (and the war) was not about slavery. If it was not about slavery, it was not about race. If it was not about race, we can believe our country doesn’t really have a race problem –and therefore there is no further need for social change. Remember, conservatives by definition want to either conserve the status quo or go back to how things used to be –it is progressives who want social change to move forward.

And if we pass laws preventing teachers from teaching students the complex issues surrounding slavery and race, we can pretend like it never happened (or that it was not that bad a thing), simultaneously making ourselves feel good and preventing the possibility of further social change. All this, despite the fact that historians know the words of the very people who formed the Confederacy, and their explicit admission that it was all about slavery and race. In other words, conservatives could construct an alternate reality built on what they want to hear. If it all sounds rather Orwellian, it should. Let’s throw in a couple of George Orwell quotes from the novel 1984: “Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.” And: “In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act.”

This has set me to thinking about the insurrection at our Capitol on January 6. We all watched it live on television; we know what happened. Most Americans were shocked and outraged, and some were embarrassed because the rioters were on their side politically. Some were already trying to spin it, saying (and there is absolutely no evidence of this) that the violent crowd was made up of antifa members in disguise. On that day, beleaguered GOP House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy vigorously denied this claim to Trump himself on the phone: “It’s MAGA. I know, I was there.” Several Republican leaders condemned the president’s role in stirring up the murderous crowd, and in the “Big Lie” that he actually won the election.

But now, five months later, it is a different story. All but a handful of those Republican leaders have backtracked on what they said the day of the insurrection (and the ones who have not are being punished). Conservative commentators are blaming nonexistent antifa spies for all the violence, and saying the MAGA crowd that day was, at best, a little “rambunctious.”

What about Republican voters? A Reuters/Ipsos poll conducted just one month ago shows that 53% of them believe Trump is the “true president.” 66% believe the election was stolen by Democrats. 20% believe those crazy QAnon conspiracy theories. Those numbers seem to be growing instead of shrinking.

It is the new Lost Cause Ideology. Conservatives are so desperate to keep things going their way (and avoid charges of treason) that they have made up a bizarre fantasy world and moved into it. Sadly, like with the original, if they keep repeating it long enough they may get most other people to believe it, too. Will Republican state legislators ban teachers from teaching the truth about that, as well?

This is a real threat to democracy.

--Troy D. Smith, a White County native, is a novelist and a history professor at Tennessee Tech. His words do not necessarily represent TTU.

A complete list of "A Liberal Dose" columns can be found HERE

A list of other historical essays that have appeared on this blog can be found HERE

Author's website: www.troyduanesmith.com

A Liberal Dose, June 10, 2021 "What Is Lost Cause Ideology?"

 

A Liberal Dose, June 10, 2021

Troy D. Smith

"What Is Lost Cause Ideology?"

Last week I talked about the fact that, in popular memory in the South, the Civil War was not “really” about slavery –even though the documents from the time show that pretty much everyone on both sides, at the beginning of that war, agreed it was being fought over slavery. I can assure you that, among professional academic historians (who are specifically trained to study and evaluate the documents of the past), it is almost universally agreed that the primary cause of that conflict was slavery.

And yet in 2011, the 150^th anniversary of the war, national polls indicated that 48% of Americans cited states’ rights as the main cause of the Civil War, with only 38% saying slavery. Another set of polls in 2015 were a little bit closer, divided almost down the middle, but according to the Washington Post (Aug. 6, 2015) white people, people over 60, and Republicans were more likely to oppose slavery being taught in schools as the main reason for the war. Still, a significant minority of non-white people, Northerners, and Democrats felt the same way. Now, to me, saying the Civil War was about states’ rights is like saying the Civil Rights movement wasn’t about racism –it was about states’ rights to be racist or not. It’s a moot point. Slave-holding states were for states’ rights when those rights protected slavery, and against them when it did not. Southern politicians were opposed to the right of newly forming states to decide for themselves whether to allow slavery or not, or the rights of Northern states to decide whether or not to return runaway slaves.

It is important to note that the Confederacy and the South were not necessarily always the same thing. About one-third of white Southerners supported the Union. When you count the slaves, almost half the population in the South was against the Confederacy. Tennessee, by the way, provided the most Union troops of any Confederate state. But do you know where Union sentiment was highest? In Appalachia –where you can’t grow cotton, and the population was not dependent on slave labor. That speaks volumes.

The fact is, after the war –when slavery was ended –was when many Southerners started saying the conflict had not been over slavery, something they all basically agreed was the cause in the beginning. Many Southern leaders, artists, and intellectuals started developing what historians call “the Lost Cause Ideology.” That ideology has several components: that slavery was not the main cause of the war, that slavery hadn’t really been that bad anyway, and that the Confederacy had been a noble lost cause to protect a better way of life. I assure you, none of those things were true –especially if you did not happen to be rich and white.

But the truth was ugly, and most people didn’t want to face it. They preferred, instead, to make up a mythology about a chivalrous, beneficent world where even the slaves were happy. Have you ever noticed how, in Gone with the Wind, none of the black people are ever mad about anything until the mean Yankees show up and disrupt their idyllic world?

In recent decades, that perception has gone beyond the borders of the South –just as you are now likely to see Confederate battle flags being waved in places that were firmly anti-Confederate, from New England to the West Coast. Claims that Confederate mythology and imagery is history and heritage coming from people who are not Southern seems strange- and indicates there is more going on than regional pride.

The Lost Cause version of the Confederacy is not tethered to fact and reality. It is an exercise in making up a story that makes you feel good –or at the very least doesn’t make you feel bad –rather than learning from the past. And passing laws to prevent anybody from questioning that story is not “protecting history” –it is protecting your own feelings.

 

--Troy D. Smith, a White County native, is a novelist and a history professor at Tennessee Tech. His words do not necessarily represent TTU.

A complete list of "A Liberal Dose" columns can be found  HERE

A list of other historical essays that have appeared on this blog can be found HERE

Author's website: www.troyduanesmith.com

A Liberal Dose, June 3, 2021 "Civil War and Slavery: Past Is Prologue"

 

A Liberal Dose, June 3, 2021

Troy D. Smith

Civil War and Slavery: Past Is Prologue

I was born and raised right here in Sparta, in 1968. When I was growing up I was fascinated by the Civil War –I still am. I researched and wrote about it in my dissertation, and in several academic publications, as well as two epic-length novels and many short stories. It is a dramatic subject, and is really second only to the American Revolution in establishing just what the United States of America is. I’ve also researched and written extensively about slavery. Like it or not (and hopefully for all of us it is “not”), slavery, too, played a huge role in the early centuries of our country and the struggle to establish what America is.

When I was growing up, the textbooks said the Civil War was fought over slavery. That’s not the impression I came away with, though. Grown-ups, including teachers, said it wasn’t “really” about slavery at all, it was about states’ rights, or tariffs, or because Yankees were jerks who tried to tell us how to live. It wasn’t really the impression I got from movies, either, like Gone with the Wind. When I was in my late teens I discovered books at the old bookstore in the mall that seemed to back up this alternative view, and that called Abraham Lincoln a racist and a tyrant. It seemed like the South was being misrepresented in the history books –and that wasn’t hard to believe, because it seemed then (and now) like the rest of the country looks down on us and treats us unfairly in general. What I’m trying to get across is, as a white Southerner I grew up thinking about the Civil War the way the majority of you probably do.

But I learned different.

In college, I met Professor Larry Whiteaker –like myself, a native of this area. I had him for U.S. History, and took his upper division course on the Civil War. Dr. Whiteaker (like my grad school co-adviser, Vernon Burton) had been directed in his dissertation at Princeton by James McPherson, Pulitzer prize winning author of Battle Cry of Freedom and probably the most esteemed living historian of the Civil War. Dr. Whiteaker was very emphatic: the Civil War was about slavery. I still wasn’t completely convinced.

Then I went to graduate school and did a deep dive into the primary documents of the era. Thanks to the wonders of Google, you can do the same without leaving your home. Check it out. The seven states that seceded to form the Confederacy (Georgia, South Carolina, Mississippi, Alabama, Florida, Louisiana, and Texas) each issued statements explaining why. The main reason: to protect the institution of slavery. Four Upper South states later joined, after the siege of Fort Sumter and Lincoln’s call for volunteers to put down the rebellion: Virginia, North Carolina, Arkansas, and Tennessee. The vice-president of the new Confederate States of America, Alexander Stephens, gave a famous speech at the very beginning of the war explaining why the Confederacy existed and why they were willing to fight. It is called “The Cornerstone Speech” –please look it up and read it. As my space here is limited, I’ll give you the high points: he said the new Confederate constitution was better than the U.S. constitution, because it explicitly (rather than vaguely) defends the institution of slavery, and because it explicitly lays out the “great truth” that black people are inferior. That “great truth,” Stephens said, was the cornerstone on which the Confederacy was built.

During grad school I read through all the available primary documents about the Civil War in the Upper Cumberland. Of particular interest was the statement prepared by the city of Cookeville that Tennessee should secede to protect slavery and keep black people in their place.

All very interesting, you might say, but what does this have to do with modern politics, or education? Stay tuned.

 

--Troy D. Smith, a White County native, is a novelist and a history professor at Tennessee Tech. His words do not necessarily represent TTU.

A complete list of "A Liberal Dose" columns can be found  HERE

A list of other historical essays that have appeared on this blog can be found HERE

Author's website: www.troyduanesmith.com