Expatriate
American author Gertrude Stein played as much a pivotal role among the Lost
Generation of expat authors, poets, artists, and musicians in Paris during the
1920’s as she did, in the form of Kathy Bates, in Woody Allen’s 2011 film
“Midnight in Paris” as mentor to hopeful author Gil Pender, portrayed by Owen
Wilson.
Visitors
to Stein’s salon in the Notre-Dame-des-Champs section of Paris and her other
associates included such luminaries as Ernest Hemingway, Scott and Zelda
Fitzgerald, T.S. Eliot, James Joyce, Oscar Wilde, Cole Porter, Josephine Baker,
James Baldwin, Aleister Crowley, Langston Hughes, Ezra Pound, Djuna Barnes, Salvador
Dali, Pablo Picasso, Luis Buñuel, Man Ray, Sylvia Beach, Henry Miller, Igor
Stravinsky, Coco Chanel, Sergei Diaghilev, Thornton Wilder, and Sherwood
Anderson, along with her brothers Michael and Leo and her lifelong partner,
Alice Toklas.
The same
folks also frequented Sylvia Beach’s Shakespeare and Company bookshop, which
served as a lending library and bookstore in addition to gathering place. Joyce nicknamed it “Stratford-on-Odeon”. It was closed in 1940 during the Occupation; after
Beach died in 1964, George Whitman’s “Le Mistral” on the Rive Gauche (Left
Bank) near the Place Saint-Michel changed its name to Shakespeare and Company
Justifiably
renowned for her contributions to the arts (she and brother Michael had
collected works by and supported some of Europe’s finest artists), Stein suggested
in 1934 that Adolf Hitler should be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. Her statement at the time was heavily laden
with language that could be interpreted as irony, but in 1938 she spearheaded
an effort to convince the Nobel Committee to do just that. During the Spanish Civil War, she publicly
endorsed Francisco Franco and the Nationalists and during the Second World War
compared Vichy leader Marshal Petain to George Washington.
What’s
wrong with this picture is that Gertrude Stein was both Jewish and gay.
In the
South, we’ve long been accustomed to such contradictions as of a Jewish lesbian
supporting a foreign political leader who was both anti-Semitic and homophobic. Reading about Stein reminded me of a
demonstration in Atlanta several years back against then-Governor of Georgia
Roy Barnes. Representatives of the
Georgia Division of the Sons of Confederate Veterans showed up in their
re-enactment uniforms at the same time as a group of family members of The Rev.
Dr. Martin Luther King. Shortly
afterward, the local chapter of the New Black Panther Party showed up.
These
three disparate groups stood together to protest a governor they detested, even
though the Black Panthers weren’t overly thrilled with the Confederate-uniformed
SCV members and neither they nor the King family contingent were comfortable
with each other either. Only in the
South.
I remember
in particular one day I substitute-taught an American history class at Howard
High School, whose student body was 99.5% black.
The class
was studying the Civil War period, and I was excited because I had just
recently turned up information about the First Colored Brigade of the Army of
the Cumberland based in Chattanooga and about the comparatively large number of
black officials both the city of Chattanooga and Hamilton County had well into
the early 20th century. I
also had information about black soldiers who had fought for the Confederacy,
including quotes from Frederick Douglas’ letter to Lincoln on the subject and
accounts of the all-black (including officers) 1st and 3rd
Louisiana Native Guards of the Confederate Army.
Of course,
I met with the teacher for whom I was substituting beforehand and showed him
some of the materials I wanted to bring in.
It proved to be one of my favorites days of substitute teaching.
What was
really interesting about it was what I discovered during the “planning period”
while looking at the wall outside the classroom. As part of getting his students to see
history from the point-of-view of its participants, the teacher had assigned
them a writing lesson in which they would take the part of a soldier writing to
his sweetheart back home or vice-versa.
They could choose for themselves whether to be Union or
Confederate. I found it quite
interesting that nearly all, with two or three exceptions, chose to be
Confederate.
Take the
case of the black student Byron Thomas, freshman at the University of South
Carolina-Beaufort, to hang the Army of Tennessee Confederate battle flag in his
dorm window. For the record, what is
commonly called the Confederate battle flag is actually that of the Army of
Tennessee. Those of Northern Virginia
and Trans-Mississippi, along with some of the smaller regional commands, had
their own battle flags.
I know
that may sound totally bizarre to those outside of or only recently relocated
to the South. Probably as bizarre as the
fact that a Jewish lesbian supported Adolf Hitler, but not very much to anyone
who’s from around here.
None of
these Howard High students were what some deride as “Uncle Toms”, to use an
alternate term for what Malik el-Shabazz called a “house Negro”. In fact, many of them were associated with
progressive, even radical organizations.
They saw themselves simply as citizens of Tennessee, which happened to
be in the Confederacy at the time of the Civil War. The choice wasn’t about politics, it was
about soldiers, and about home.
They were
all pleasantly surprised to learn of the Union’s Department of the Cumberland’s
First Colored Brigade, however.
Speaking
of the term “Uncle Tom”, it is misused.
In Harriet Beecher Stowe’s novel Uncle
Tom’s Cabin (the 2nd best-selling of the 19th
century, behind Lew Wallace’s Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ and ahead of
Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward: 2000-1887), Uncle Tom is
rather a courageous figure, beaten to death for refusing to himself beat
another slave. The opposite of how pop
culture likes to portray him, which is in the mold of Malik el-Shabazz’s
(Malcolm X) “field Negro” collaborator who fawns over his/her Master.
Another
term oft-misused as an epithet is “Ugly American”. It derives from the 1958 novel by Eugene
Burdick and William Lederer, The Ugly
American. For most of the world, an
“Ugly American” means those loud, overbearing Americans who live overseas,
particularly in what used to be called the Third World, staying inside their
“Golden Ghetto” (as the book calls it), treating the locals with condescension,
patronization, and outright contempt.
In the
novel, however, the central figure you meet in the chapter “The Ugly American”
is actually very respectful of the nationals in his host country, with he and
his wife living in one of the village with the same amenities as their
neighbors and treating them with mutual respect. The only person more heroic and more in tune
with the local people is “The Ugly Ugly American”.
There can
be no doubt that the original seven states of the Confederacy (South Carolina,
Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, and Texas) seceded to
preserve slavery, pure and simple. So
much for the “noble” Lost Cause. That is
why even though I am qualified several times over for the SCV’s Military Order
of Stars and Bars I will never join. In
addition to Confederate military veterans, the MOSB allows descendants of
former Confederate officials and legislators, the very slave-owning planted
aristocracy which brought about the War Between the States in the first place.
The Sons
of Confederate Veterans (SCV), on the other hand, is a different story. The SCV is solely for descendants of
Confederate military veterans, though there is a provision for associate
members that permits nearly anyone to join.
With seventy-three qualifying lineal and collateral ancestors, I have
been a member (though long inactive) for a decade and a half. I am even adjutant emeritus of the SCV’s
now-defunct Sam Bennett Camp. The SCV
isn’t about politics (except for the League of the South faction from South
Georgia to which I am bitterly opposed); it’s about soldiers.
Another
fact of which there can be no doubt is that tens of thousands of blacks, both
slaves and freemen, served with the Confederate armies. While the number of those who actually fought
as combat soldiers may be in dispute, Frederick Douglas is among those
providing witness to what might seem to some contrary to common sense.
After the
war, Douglas joined one of the American
sections of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engel’s International Workingmen’s
Association, which he left in 1872 with others to form the Equal Rights
Party. That same year the former slave
ran for Vice President as running mate to Virginia Woodhull on the party’s
ticket. Woodhull, not Shirley Chisholm
nor even Belva Ann Lockwood was the first woman to run for U.S. President just
as Douglas, not Chisholm, was the first black to run for executive office.
For the
students at Howard High, the question when they were choosing with which side
to identify was not about politics but about home, their city and state, about
belonging where they lived. Not in the
sense of being an “Uncle Tom” but rather of claiming their right of citizenship
by birth. Which was the same reason so
many black men fought for the Confederacy in defiance of what makes sense to 21st
century politically-correct minds.
Regarding
Gertrude Stein, she was a lifelong Republican and very much anti-leftist, in
spite of the company she kept. More
afraid of Communism than its alternative, she saw fascists such as Hitler,
Mussolini, and Franco as the best hope for keeping the Bolshevik horde at
bay. However, unlike Coco Chanel,
Stein’s collaboration never went much farther than translating several speeches
by Vichy president Marshal Petain into English.
She even compared the German army occupiers to the Keystone Kops.
As for the
designer of fashion extraordinaire, inventor of the LBD (little black dress),
and matriarch of modern melanoma, Coco Chanel actively spied for her German
friends, and though the Americans and Brits salivated over her designs once she
started back in production, the French despised her for the rest of her life
and still do to this day.
To those
outside the American South who think they understand the South…you really don’t
understand anything. To those from the
American South who think they understand the South…you need to wake up.
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