July 15, 2005
View Comments | Post CommentProfessor Farley Saga
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Two and a half years ago, Vanderbilt Professor Jonathan Farley (he looks so nice when he isn't backed by a picture of Che) wrote an article in The Tennessean (reprinted here in a San Fran paper) commenting on the name change of Confederate Memorial Hall, and on confederate memorials in general. It included some vitriolic stabs and invective rhetoric. The most conspicuous of these statements were
"Lest we forget, the Confederacy aimed to destroy the United States. Every Confederate soldier, by the mores of his age and ours, deserved not a hallowed resting place at the end of his days but a reservation at the end of the gallows. The UDC honors traitors."and then...
"Indeed, the race problems that wrack America to this day are due largely to the fact that the Confederacy was not thoroughly destroyed, its leaders and soldiers executed and their lands given to the landless freed slaves."
Farley became a victim of institutionalized censorship, and fortunately moved to better jobs at MIT and Harvard, but not before I wrote this "From The Editor" column in The Slant
My column was not solely positive toward Farley (I say he is "one of these idiots" who has trouble talking about race without being a moron, and call him a "crackpot math teacher") but it was certainly not negative. I was all about his right to say that stuff, and I was even happy that someone had said it. I didn't agree with everything he said, especially the second statement quoted above, but I was supportive of his right to say it, and very critical of the administration for their suggestions that he used poor judgement in writing the article. On the whole, I think my column was probably the most supportive thing written about him in Vanderbilt or Nashville media.
And then, a couple weeks ago, I was contacted by Vanderbilt Professor Jonathan Farley in regard to my column of two years ago. I knew it wasn't going to be pleasant, because he called my family's house in the morning on Saturday, June 26th; Calling a twenty-two year old at 9:00am on a Saturday means you must be seeking revenge on him for something. Jeff Woodhead, another Slant guy who mentioned Farley in a column about commemorating Martin Luther King in Orbis, also received a call from Farley.
He said some stuff about how all of the articles written about him were very damaging, including mine. The word "libel" came up, but not in a specific threat. We discussed a bit about the article, but I told him I hadn't read the article nor what I wrote about it in at least two years. From the way he was talking, I got the impression that he hadn't either. Like he'd made a list back then of people to call up and bitch to about it, and was only now getting down to my name. We talked for probably ten or fifteen minutes about it. It ended with him requesting that I read over his article and what I'd written, and consider retracting my column, or adding some notes to its page on the website, since people saw it when they googled for him. So, I told him I would at least read over them.
After having done so, my first reaction is that I can't believe anyone made such a big deal about his original article. It's fairly sensible, with the exception of the second quoted block above. I guess dialogue has just become a lot more bitter and divided in the last two years, but I don't think his column would be very provocative if it came out now. My second reaction was that rhetorically speaking, he really slipped up in including that one paragraph to which I keep referring toward the end. Including that drew the focus of his piece away from the protestations against memorials to the founder of the Ku Klux Klan and toward his own desires that all the Confederates would have been executed.
My third reaction, and the one most relevant to his contacting me, is that I not only stand by what I originally wrote, but I have to wonder why he wasn't calling me up to thank me for it. When he called, one of the things he said is that no one debated the merits of his column, instead focusing on attacks on him. And it's true that I did not specifically discuss what I thought he had right and wrong and why; that wasn't the focus of my column. I was focused on reminding everyone, "Let him say it."
But he was obviously misinformed for mentioning libel in the context of a personal opinion column written in a satirical newspaper. He made himself a public figure, which makes him a legal target, and since we're satire and everyone knows it, we're free to mischaracterize his views, call him names, and make up absurd things about him all we want. I could have said "Farley wants to kill all the descendents of Confederates so that he will be free to rape white women." I definitely don't think that, and that bundles up a lot of ridiculous stereotypes, but the point is, I could have been as extreme as I wanted to be with impunity. But I wasn't. I supported his right to say it, and I didn't even make any argument against what he said.
But now, since I didn't then, I will make some arguments. First of all, I agree with what he's saying: we should not have monuments to Nathan Bedford Forrest, the man who started an organization whose primary purpose was to enforce oppression. And I agree that by the laws of our day and theirs, the treasonous Confederates should have been executed. In my mind, that speaks more to the spitefulness and archaic values embodied in the laws than any really grave crimes on the part of most Confederates.
While a lot of Confederates were fighting to save slavery, a lot were too uninformed to care about anything except, "The Yankees are invading our homeland and trying to force us to submit to laws we don't agree with." If you execute them, you've gotta execute all the United States' patriots who committed treason against his majesty King George III. I don't support the death penalty in any case, but I certainly don't support it for attempted succession. Philosophically, I support the right of any people to declare independence, and philosophically, I think they should be allowed to secede, along with the land they occupy. That isn't very practical, but I certainly am not going to condemn the confederacy for attempting to secede. There are plenty of other things to condemn most of them for.
On the other hand, I would support the statement that anyone who treated their slaves poorly (beat them, raped them, overworked them, starved them) should have been tried for those crimes, and sentenced accordingly. But not just for fighting on the side of the Confederacy in the Civil War. I don't think they're good guys for supporting the Confederacy, but as I said, I don't think 99% of the people were educated enough to even understand the issues prompting secession that were under debate. I wholeheartedly condemn slavery and the abuses that stemmed from it, and I condemn the Confederate support of the institution of slavery, but I don't necessarily condemn the attempted Confederate secession.
And so, I think that Farley misses the mark. He goes after anyone involved in the Confederacy, rather than just those who committed abuses. He'd probably cite figures that say some high percentage of confederate soldiers owned slaves, but he cannot deny that there were some Confederate soldiers who neither owned slaves, nor supported the right of others who owned slaves. Furthermore, there were black people who fought for the Confederacy. They must have seen something important about the fight other than simply the desire to preserve slavery. Should they have been executed as well?
Either way, all of that has little to do with his point that we should not be erecting monuments to Nathan Bedford Forrest. I support that point without reservation. But Farley's digressions killed his effectiveness.
So, the conclusion of the whole thing is that I think it was a little strange for him to call me up two years after my column, and would be so even if I had spitefully criticized him at the time. But after reading over everything and realizing that I did no such thing, his call and his anger were completely misplaced.
Posted at July 15, 2005 2:58 PM | Comments (13)
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Having re-read your article after all these years, I too am surprised Dr. Farley called you, not realizing that (a few meant-to-be-funny cracks notwithstanding) the article is in support of him.
You and Dr. Farley are also absolutely right that no state in this Union should have a statue erected to honor Nathan Bedford Forrest. The trouble is, that crazy looking statue flanked by Confederate flags off I-65 was built using private funds on private property by a bunch of wacko neo-Confederates. Most people in Nashville agree that the stupid thing is ridiculous, but we can't exactly seize the land and destroy the statue. (Unless, of course, we call it "public good" and invoke eminent domain, which I suppose is an alternative.)
Posted by: Mike at July 15, 2005 5:45 PM
Hell, given the current law of the land on the meaning of "public good", I bet I could make a winning argument that condemning the statue is a public good. Sure, I would be violating my own principles re: private property if I actually made such an argument, but damn it would be fun.
I've been looking forward to seeing what you had to say about this...especially since we've said just about all that can be said over at Jeff's blog.
While I generally agree with you that (a) statues to Forrest and his ilk are stupid and I would take great pleasure in personally smashing them with a wrecking ball, (b) mass slaughter of hundreds of thousands of people, including Confederate soldiers, is a bad thing, and (c) not every soldier is equally culpable for the crimes of the Confederacy....I still gotta disagree with one point you made.
You say "I condemn the Confederate support of the institution of slavery, but I don't necessarily condemn the attempted Confederate secession." I do. Not necessarily the idea of secession itself...nothing particularly evil about that. But, as Farley ably pointed out in his article, and as Tim Boyd once pointed out in a letter to The Torch, the Confederate secession WAS primarily about slavery. The Confederate vice-president himself said so. It doesn't matter whether every soldier was fighting for slavery....if they had won, slavery would have continued to exist.
Anyways, a minor quibble with your otherwise excellent blog entry. I think you made the right decision.
On my blog, I wrote an article defending and critiquing Dr. Farley for bringing all this up 2 years later and demanding retractions.
On an unrelated point, this is a hell of a nice-looking blog you got here, David. How do you get that picture at the top that keeps changing every time you refresh?
Posted by: Ben Stark at July 15, 2005 9:23 PM
Not that this should become a long thread of argument, but I'll say some rarely said and possibly unpopular things:
Forrest created the KKK, however, when he realized that the secret society he formed was turning into a white power organization, he gave it up ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nathan_Bedford_Forrest under 'Postwar activities'). The KKK was quelled until the 20s (by Congressional anti-lynching laws), until a wave of nostalgia ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birth_of_a_nation ) brought it back with all the horrors of what it had become. People who look to Forrest as a white power hero are as uninformed as everybody else, I suppose.
The civil war was an economic issue. Slavery was such an issue. If the industrialized North had been able to provide a solution to the labor problem, there would be no slavery. When you threaten a man's wallet, you threaten his life, or so you would think to see him react. To this day, we have problems with greedy companies doing evil things. Why? Because people do dispicable things for money. You have to give a capitalist a reason to quit.
So there.
Posted by: Daniel at July 16, 2005 2:55 AM
I certainly agree that any memorial specifically honoring the Confederacy is honoring traitors (Jefferson might not have seen a problem with this, but this is neither here nor there). I also understand that the need for healing the coutnry would make executing all the member of the Confederacy impractical. I believe that such widespread "purges" would have done the country more harm than good.
However, I think that there should be a memorial to commemorate the hardships and devestation experienced by both sides.
On the subject of the Forrest memorial: one argument to get the statue at least moved would be that it is distracting. The first time I drove past it I did a double take and almost got in a car accident.
Posted by: Camacho at July 17, 2005 12:16 AM
As a post script, I am reminded of former United Nations Secretary General Kurt Waldheim, who the US and Israel opposed, because he had served in the German army during the Second World War, and allegations were made that he had been a member of the National Socialist Party. In the end it was revealed that he was conscripted into the regular Wehrmacht, not the Waffen SS, and had barely finnished a hurried basic training before the war ended. That he served his country out of a sense of duty (however misguided) was ignored, because of the atrocities committed by the government at the time. Most Germans had some idea that prison camps had been established, the first of which was used to detain Communists, and may have some idea that forced labor was used in the war effort, but the acts of genocide were largely unknown by the German public.
The film Europa, Europa is a good example of someone getting caught up in a mistaken sense of duty. A young Jewish man joins the German army in the early thirties, and is able to hide his ancestry when the Nazis come to power. At first he serves his country out of a sense of patriotism, but while serving in the Eastern Front against the Soviet Union, he witnesses the atrocities committed by the Waffen SS.
Posted by: Camacho at July 17, 2005 12:29 AM
Well, I don't know much about this, but true to form, I'll say something anyway.
I actually somewhat agree with his comments regarding the Confederacy. I've always been appalled at Republican support for anything to do with the Stars and Bars. Execute the generals and soldiers? Well, that's a bit extreme. But we shouldn't have been so forgiving nor should've we allowed them back into the union so easily without oversight.
Posted by: Michael Wilt at July 17, 2005 6:53 AM
Oh, and an ironic corollary that I just realized. At the time of writing this post about Farley calling me up and accusing me of being a racist... my MP3 feed (on the right of the main page of my blog) showed the last 10 MP3s listened to as by Public Enemy, and the last movie watched as "Guess Who's Coming To Dinner." Doesn't mean I'm not racist, but definitely ironic.
Posted by: David Barzelay at July 17, 2005 9:16 PM
i can't find it, but i posted a little while ago on farley...i have several thoughts on this guy and loved reading about this new fodder. just sounds like he didn't get the girl in college or something...
note: he's just a visiting prof at harvard this year...he's actually at the univ of buffalo where my current roommate will be a collegue of his...hopefully more stories will come about...
Posted by: Jonathan Newport at July 20, 2005 6:37 PM
Visiting Prof at Harvard, MIT, Univ of Buffalo... as far as I know, he's still officially a Professor at Vanderbilt. He's still in People Finder listed as a Professor, and he still has his own page up with CV linked to from the Math Dept. Either that, or they're all just really lazy (not unlikely).
Posted by: David Barzelay at July 20, 2005 6:51 PM
He's not at Buffalo - see his own comment to some guy's blog (interestingly posted around the same time he was calling David and Jeff). Here is the part about his job: "I would also like to point out that I am not a professor at SUNY Buffalo nor am I a "post-doctoral fellow" at Harvard (having obtained my doctorate from Oxford 10 years ago!): I received tenure at Vanderbilt University, and for the past 2 years taught at MIT. Recently I have been based at Harvard, and next year I will be a Science Fellow at Stanford University's Center for International Security."
Posted by: Cara Bohon at July 20, 2005 7:51 PM
Isn't it funny, and in a hollow but yet sick commentary, that many of the comments thus far have yet to bring forth the real issue at hand-not Professor Farley, or the misguided superiors of Vanderbilt University- but the fact that an estimated 3 million enslaved Africans had lost their lives in order to fatten the coffers of Europeans who even today would deny those of African descent their humanity. Unfortunately, what my European brothers and sisters fail to realize, is that a highly educated black man's comments as those made by Professor Farley represent a historical means of defiance to a system that has been set up to destroy the lives and character (through defamation, ropes and bullets) of outspoken black men who have had the sagacity to decry oppression. My white pals, do the names Malcolm and Martin ring a bell? Well let me continue. Patrice Lamumba, Kwame Ture, and the list goes on! You see, the "real deal" is that behind your cloak of compassionate conservatism and inclusive liberal hypocrisy is the fact that although you all promote free speech, that right certainly has not been extended to the blacks and the brown people of America. In essence, through your statements, the underlying theme is N_ _ _ _ _ know your place! We the descendents of slavery
are merely reactionary. The views you interpret as hatred are merely the remnant bellows of our ancestors heard in the hulls of slaving ships. The "We shall overcome" days are over. A far as I am concerned, in order to combat this scourge, requires the mentality of a Nat Turner.
Posted by: Joe Machy at July 23, 2005 4:32 PM
Oh I forgot to add, that at the end of the day, you "Guys" hide behind your laws and guns. The reality is, that you emasculated males do not have the brains or the balls to tangle one on one with Professor Farley...Go and Fuck yourselves!
Posted by: joe Machy at July 23, 2005 5:12 PM
Did you even read my column? The whole thing was about Professor Farley's entitlement to make the statements he did.
Posted by: David Barzelay at July 23, 2005 5:17 PM
