Speaking of Re-writing History

I'm not the only conservative of Southern extraction who's taking exception to recent efforts to re-write the region's history. In one of the more thorough fiskings I've seen recently, Feddie from Southern Appeal utterly deconstructs an essay by one Steve Suitts, a biographer of former Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black.

It's a complicated but interesting and important story, so you'll want to read Feddie's entire post. In brief, Suitts not only defends Hugo Black's dark period when he was a member of the KKK, but attempts to tar Judge William H. Pryor, Jr., in the process. As you might expect, he's no more successful in whitewashing the past to suit contemporary sensibilities than were Vanderbilt's leaders in their recent, and similar, efforts (see below). In the first case, objections to Southern history led some to try sand blasting a chapter of history they found offensive; in the second, a modern apologist for a liberal icon wants to engage in a bit of historical revisionism and moral relativism.

Both stories highlight the need to write history, as best we can, truthfully with no attempt to distort what we can learn from the evidence. And both demonstrate that, in modern America, the left is far more likely to engage in such distortion for political ends than is the right.