Speaker 1:
From the Library of the New York Stock Exchange at the corner of Wall and Broad Streets in New York City, you're inside the ICE House, our podcast from Intercontinental Exchange on markets, leadership, and vision and global business, the dream drivers that have made the NYSE an indispensable institution of global growth for over 225 years.
Speaker 1:
Each week, we feature stories of those who hatched plans, create jobs, and harness the engine of capitalism. Right here, right now at the NYSE and at ICE's Exchanges and clearing houses around the world. And now welcome, Inside the ICE House. Here's your host, Josh King of Intercontinental Exchange.
Josh King:
One of the great traditions here at the New York Stock Exchange is welcoming students from all over the world to learn about our capital markets. But we draw the definition of students broadly from the local high schoolers who come here to colonels attending the U.S. Army War College as they earn their master's degree in strategic studies and advance their careers toward becoming general officers.
Josh King:
I had a chance last week to give closing remarks to the colonels as they wrapped up their virtual visit to the NYSE. The War College brands itself as a think factory for commanders and civilian leaders to consider the future role for ground forces in ensuring our national security.
Josh King:
I made the connection when I talked to them between their service and the technological platforms, to be blunt, the weapons and transportation systems and medical equipment that they need to defend peace and freedom around the world and help care for and heal those wounded in action. All of those systems, in one way or another, began as ideas that needed capital raised here to literally get off the ground.
Josh King:
You know a lot of the names the top 10 defense contractors are Lockheed Martin, Boeing, General Dynamics, Raytheon, Northrop Grumman, United Technologies, Huntington Ingalls, Humana, Harris, and BAE Systems or to put it in terms we understand here at the NYSE that's ticker symbols. LMT, B, GD, RTX, NOC formerly UTC before it merged with Raytheon, HII, HUM, and BAL.
Josh King:
I've been to several of those factories during my time in politics and government. Bath Iron Works, Newport News Shipbuilding, Electric Boat in Groton and Sikorsky in Stratford, Connecticut, the old McDonnell Douglas plant in Long Beach that built the C 17 long before Boeing acquired McDonnell.
Josh King:
I even wrote a whole book about General Dynamics Land Systems in Sterling Heights Michigan during the snafu when Governor Mike Dukakis decided to ride in an M1A1 tank on September 13, 1988.
Josh King:
But even more important than the materiel that are military factories turnout are the men and women that are think factories like the Army War College produce at other places like West Point, Annapolis, the Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs, the Coast Guard Academy in New London, the ROTC programs around the country, and our whole education system that feeds into officer candidate schools and recruitment drives among the enlisted ranks. How are their minds being shaped on the assembly line of information and cultural experiences that they get on those campuses in schools?
Josh King:
Our regular listeners may recall that I grew up in Newton, Massachusetts not far from the memorial by sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens of Robert Gould Shaw on Boston Common leading the men of the 54th Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry as it marched down Beacon Street on its way ultimately to engage Confederate forces at Port Wagner near Charleston, South Carolina in July 1863.
Josh King:
I'm a northern kid from the cradle of the abolitionist movement but even I found myself drawn in by the Lost Cause myth. It was all over the place in the 1970s. My parents took me to Gettysburg, they bought me the replica Confederate kepi hat which I thought looked pretty cool.
Josh King:
Years later, even when I worked in the White House, I helped put on the premiere of Ron Maxwell's Gettysburg movie that in a way further deified Stratford Hall, Virginia's Robert E. Lee as portrayed by Martin Sheen just a few years before Sheen would become Manchester, New Hampshire's own president Jed Bartlet on Aaron Sorkin's West Wing. Hollywood has a way of glamorizing mythology.
Josh King:
But today, 160 years to the day after the Battle of Fort Sumter, coming up on 150 years after the Battle of Gettysburg, and 28 years after Gettysburg, the movie, we're going to cut through the mythology and talk about the truth with retired Brigadier General Ty Seidule, the former head of the history department at the United States Military Academy and now the author of Robert E. Lee and Me: A Southerner's Reckoning with the Myth of the Lost Cause. Our conversation with Ty Seidule coming up right after this.
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Josh King:
Our guest today, Ty Seidule is professor emeritus of history at West Point where he taught for two decades. He served in the U.S. Army for 36 years, retiring as a brigadier general in 2020. Currently, Ty is the chamberlain fellow at Hamilton College as well as a New America fellow. He's published numerous books, articles, and videos on military history including the award winning West Point History of the civil war, and now his new bestseller, Robert E. Lee and Me. Ty graduated from Washington and Lee University, holds a PhD from the Ohio State University.
Josh King:
Ty, welcome Inside the ICE House.
Ty Seidule:
Great to be here. Thanks so much for having me.
Josh King:
Ty, I loved your book and listened to a lot of the appearances and podcasts in which you've appeared to promote it. But most of them jump right into the issues that took you viral. Can we start with Second Lieutenant Seidule in the first few years of your army career? You started as a tank platoon commander stationed in Germany, commanded a cavalry unit of the 82nd Airborne during the Gulf War. Can you take us back to your first few years in uniform?
Ty Seidule:
Well, my first years in uniform were during the Cold War. And when I first came in the army, I had no desire to serve. I came in because I ran out of money in college, I needed an ROTC scholarship, and at that time, they were giving away ROTC scholarships like Pez and I got one, allowed me to stay in college and knowing that I would never stay in more than four years, I couldn't even imagine that, and here I was, I served for nearly 36 years.
Ty Seidule:
My first assignment was in 8th infantry division in Mannheim, Germany as a tank platoon leader, tank company XO during the Cold War. Our mission was to deter Soviet aggression and that's what we practice. Fact that time, we were not that great an army coming out of the Vietnam experience. Our soldiers weren't as good. Our equipment wasn't as good. I didn't have an M1 tank when I first came in. We had Jeeps. We had the old stuff. In fact, our motor pool where we kept our tanks was mud, or mud in the winter and dust in the summer. It was terrible.
Ty Seidule:
In fact, I remember that the second leading cause of death among soldiers in Europe that year first was privately owned vehicles, cars. The second was Coke machines. And the reason it was Coke machines is that they had beer in them and they would put quarters in there, 50 cents would get you a beer, and they would get... The soldiers would be drunk and rock the Coke machine and it would fall on them killing them. It was a tough era to be in.
Ty Seidule:
But then after that, after three years there, [inaudible 00:08:45] stationed overseas, stationed there fighting the good fight against the Soviets, not having to fight actually, but deterring. We did a great job of that.
Ty Seidule:
Then I went to the 82nd Airborne Division. It was just a great experience for me being with some of the best soldiers in the U.S. Army jumping out of planes. In fact, we had tanks that actually fell out of the sky, eight parachutes, each parachute about the size of a house. I don't recommend that in the future of dropping tanks out of airplanes but we did it successfully. Did it into Panama in 1989. I was there at Fort Bragg, I didn't go to Panama, supported there. And then I commanded a cavalry troop in the first Gulf War as we went to... I was on the fourth plane there to, first, deter Saddam and then to overthrow that regime.
Ty Seidule:
My first eight years were in operational units first deterring Soviet aggression and then in the 82nd either ready to go to war and then going to war just for defend the Constitution.
Josh King:
I spoke about the students of the Army War College in the introduction, Ty. Talk to us about the progression of an army officer in your case as an example that takes a soldier off the battlefield, out of Germany, out of Iraq, and puts him in a classroom to get his master's and then PhD at Ohio State ultimately become a teacher at West Point. How did your career take that route?
Ty Seidule:
Well, I knew that I wanted to do this. I had no idea that there were these jobs in the army other than in my case, tanks or cavalry, doing that for your entire life. I had no idea when I was an undergraduate at Washington and Lee. I guess I was a junior or senior there and somebody came with a letter, they did letters back then, and said, "If you want to, after you've done company command..."
Ty Seidule:
As a tanker, you do platoon and then you would be a captain. Through about your eighth year, you would command, in my case, a cavalry troop or tank company or an infantry company and then after that you do a broadening assignment. And what I could do, which I didn't realize, is that the army would send you fully funded to graduate school for two years and then teach at West Point for three before going back to the operational army.
Ty Seidule:
The idea is twofold. One is a broadening assignment that you want your officers to understand something more than just tanks because as you go up in rank, you think about politics, you think about relationship with Congress, relationship with foreign governments, both adversarial and our allies. You want somebody that can think but remember, the most important six inches of the battlefield are between the ears of an officer.
Ty Seidule:
And so that's what I did. I went to Ohio State to study military history. They have a great military history program there and I got my MA and then I was able to double up in classes and get everything but my dissertation and then I taught three years at West Point. Fantastic assignments, to educate... We have the best mission at West Point, I think, in America to educate, train, and inspire leaders of character for the nation who live the values of duty, honor, country and I just loved it. Loved teaching, loved being at West Point. And I knew that if I could do that again, I would but that was that three years.
Ty Seidule:
And then when I finished that, I went back to the... Actually, I got more education. Maybe people don't realize how much professional military education officers did. So two years of grad school then I went and did a year at the Command and General Staff College at Fort Leavenworth, another year of education. We prize that professional military education in the army.
Josh King:
And talked about education in West Point, Ty. I love sports and every year my son and I get excited in the run up to the Army Navy game to see how West Point and Annapolis reinvent their game uniforms made by Nike, that's NYSE ticker symbol NKE and Under Armour, that's ticker symbol UAA, respectively to honor different divisions and units in American military history. Tell us how you got involved with Nike and army coach Jeff Monken to lend accuracy to the uniforms honoring the 82nd.
Ty Seidule:
Oh, yeah. At one of my favorite projects. So you never know what you're going to do at West Point. Boo Corrigan, who is the athletic director then at West Point, now he's at NC State, came to me and wanted to rebrand army athletics. What Boo wanted was a historian and a historical perspective and I did the history of West Point. We marry the two and we went out to Nike to rebrand army athletics using history to tell story.
Ty Seidule:
What Nike did was they tell stories using textiles. That's what they do. I tell stories using historical evidence. So we both did the same thing and we came together to do that.
Ty Seidule:
And then a couple years later, we came back together after we did this rebrand to do the uniforms themselves and we started out, I think, with the 82nd Airborne Division and we told a story using textiles and then the historians, then we put together a micro website.
Ty Seidule:
It really was a way of marketing to the world this link between West Point and the army. We've done the 10th Mountain Division. We've done all these divisions to link the army to West Point and link the army and West Point to the nation. Incredibly successful.
Ty Seidule:
The storytellers that they have at Nike are been so great about that. It's one of my favorite experiences. In fact, I got to host Phil Knight when he came to West Point and then I escort him to the Army Navy game. We don't have a great nation because we have a great military, we have a great military because we represent a great nation and the taxpayers are the ones that pay for that so we want to link to that in any possible way and through sports and particularly through history are two wonderful ways to do that and to combine them together, unbelievably.
Josh King:
I think those 10th Mountain all white uniforms were the best of the series and it was even better because that's when the army broke Navy's streak of many years.
Ty Seidule:
And it was in the snow [crosstalk 00:14:30]. It was a great game in the snow. Camouflage. That was what we did. We camouflaged and it was so cool to see that snow coming down. We won in the last second and beat that... And it was great.
Ty Seidule:
That Army Navy game is very important to the army. I wish I could tell you that is some rational reason for but we humans are not rational creatures. The Army Navy game is something deep inside the army and particularly West Point and you got to win that thing every once in a while and we had it like 14 or 15 years and that victory was huge for us.
Josh King:
In the 120 times Army and Navy have squared off, Navy's won 61 times, Army 52, and there have been seven ties. Which brings us to the topic at hand, Ty, because there's this oft used quote that history is written by the victors. But your book, Robert E. Lee and Me takes us through nearly 200 years of the losers shaping the narrative. Beyond the mythology that Hollywood can sometimes get wrong which I talked about in the intro, why did even Northern historians bend history to preserve the honor of the South?
Ty Seidule:
It's a great question. What this is, is why did the Lost Cause thrive? Why did it win in a way? The south lost the war but they won the narrative, they won the history. And the reason is, is because they had so much to gain by it and they pushed it. It was an entire white Southern society. Remember, we often say southerners, it was white Southerners that did this and they created this myth and over the course of 50 years, it won.
Ty Seidule:
And the myth is that the war wasn't really fought over slavery. Well, that's just bogus. It's totally fought over slavery. It said that enslaved people were happy and that the slave system was the best possible way of doing it. It's just horrific. Slavery was an abomination featuring rape, the lash, selling families apart for profit.
Ty Seidule:
Those three, along with the idea that reconstruction, this idea of bringing the states back into the Union and where America tried to create a biracial society based on equality, that was a failure because black people weren't ready for the vote or high office also just terribly untrue. These things created though an ideology, a belief system. What it did was it brought white America back together by keeping the foot on black America.
Ty Seidule:
It was a way of seeing the world that brought the United States of America back, particularly in the war in 1898, Spanish American War and World War I and even World War II, bring America together but do that at the expense of black people and it was incredibly successful in doing that. It poisoned not only history, race relations but the economy of the United States, particularly the South as well.
Josh King:
In the book, you point out that history even adapted verbiage to allow the United States Army to virtually disappear during the war by calling it the Union army. That's certainly how I grew up in the 1970s thinking about it with my [inaudible 00:17:36] kepi hats.
Josh King:
How can the words we use to shape our understanding of history whether we refer to the Civil War as the War Between the States, the blue and the gray, or even looking back at Sherman's March as burning plantations rather than destroying enslaved labor camps just as the 89th Infantry liberated Buchenwald on April 4, 1945?
Ty Seidule:
The language affects how we see the war.
Ty Seidule:
For instance, I grew up and Virginia is thinking it was the War Between the States but that makes it two equal sides. When they started in the 19th century, it was the War of the Rebellion because it was saying this was an illegal war. That's why... I would rather call it the War of the Rebellion or Frederick Douglass former slave said, "It's the Slaveholders' Rebellion." What I don't say is War Between the States.
Ty Seidule:
If the Union Army and you make it... This army fought only one battle. No. This army, the United States Army wore a blue uniform, the same uniform that I wore throughout my career, the same uniform that George Washington pick for the Continental Army so it's the United States Army. What that means is that the Southerners killed U.S. Army soldiers which was wrong. It also means that they were sedition, insurrectionist, they were wrong, and they fought for a slave republic.
Ty Seidule:
There's no moral judgment when we say union, there's no moral judgment when we say the War Between the States. There should be a moral judgment on this because they... And the other word we should use is trader. Trader. Treason. These words shape the way we think and I use them over and over again. I use it with my students, I use it with the public and it shapes the way we see it because this was a war where traders fought for slavery.
Josh King:
Robert E. Lee and Me follows your life experiences and dives deep into the history of the places that shaped them. This started with your hometown of Alexandria's relationship with race which doesn't begin with succession but rather a word that I hadn't heard before I read your book. How does retrocession shaped Alexandria so that despite being a D.C. suburb, a local high school only honors those who died on the Southern side?
Ty Seidule:
Yeah, this just blew me away when I did the research. I had no idea growing up.
Ty Seidule:
But if you think of it, many of your listeners have been to Washington, D.C. before and if they look at it now on the one side, on the east side, it's like half a diamond and the Potomac makes this jagged border on the west side. Well, it used to be 100 square miles.
Ty Seidule:
It used to look like a diamond and it was a diamond because if anybody have seen the Hamilton, the play that the room where it happens was Madison, Jefferson, and Hamilton decided where the capital should be and they decided should be north of where it is now and George Washington said, "Oh, heck no. You need to move it south. I have my favorite city of Alexandria in it." That's what they did. It used to be 100 square miles in 1846, '47.
Ty Seidule:
They retroceded and left the district to go back to Virginia. Why did they do that? To protect the slave trade. And sure enough, three years later, D.C. outlawed trade in human beings and all of that went to Alexandria. Alexandria was a major slave trading hub prior to the Civil War and even though... And then after the war, it spent... During the war, sorry, it spent less than 12 hours in the Confederacy before it was occupied by the United States Army and spent the rest of the war behind the lines.
Ty Seidule:
Yet growing up as a kid in Alexandria, we had dozens scores of streets named after confederates. Lee is his hometown of Alexandria. I grew up revering Lee and Alexandria instead of understanding the history of enslavement and the terrible system, a brutal nature of slavery in my hometown.
Josh King:
The history covered in the book, Ty, finds this consistent theme, each move towards a quality led to a counter move to try to maintain the status quo. What was the counter offensive by Alexandria to President Harry Truman's executive order 9981 the desegregated units in Europe under General Bruce Cooper Clarke and led to full military desegregation during the Korean War?
Ty Seidule:
That's a great description of what Truman did. But this was like a nuclear bomb among white southerners in the South. Then Governor Harry Byrd, finally Senator Harry Byrd, of Virginia said, "We're going to do massive resistance," and the State of Virginia led the entire South to say, "No." Not just no but, "Hell no. Never are we going to do this."
Ty Seidule:
They did this massive resistance and I didn't realize it when I was growing up but it was there. Most of the street names in Alexandria were named the 1950s and '60s after Confederates because you can scratch a Confederate monument and if it's prior to World War II particularly 1899 to 1920 when most of them came up, that is a [inaudible 00:22:34] white supremacy and the fact that white South is now back in the saddle. They're leading. The ones after World War II are a reaction against integration. That's what those Confederate monuments are. Lived it in Alexandria.
Ty Seidule:
In fact, I was bused across town from the white elementary school, Douglas MacArthur, to the segregated all black school and what was the name of that segregated black school? Robert E. Lee Elementary School. The other segregated black school was Stonewall Jackson. When were those named? 1961 with the height of the massive resistance movement. There were towns in Virginia that closed every school not for disease like we're doing now but to ensure white supremacy because they would not integrate those schools.
Ty Seidule:
Massive resistance to integration went on throughout the South and it affected every black child and me too during that time. In fact, one of those schools, the person that was most responsible for the segregation of Alexandria school was the guy named T.C. Williams. T.C. Williams, for those listeners may have seen the movie Remember the Titans was the name of the school in Alexandria, the high school that came together during the integration era.
Ty Seidule:
In fact, just this week, they have renamed T.C. Williams High School because Williams was an ardent segregationist, believed fully that every school in Alexandria should be white schools and black schools. They just renamed it to Alexandria City High School which I think is absolutely fantastic.
Josh King:
You enrolled at Washington and Lee which of course is named after George Washington and Robert E. Lee. I've only been there once when our Swarthmore lacrosse team was thrashed by the W&L Generals on our spring trip in 1984. How did the campus serve as a finishing school for the modern Southern gentlemen and what led you to join the ROTC program there?
Ty Seidule:
Yes. That same age, I graduated in 1984 and I went there because of Washington and Lee. They were the two greatest heroes. I wanted to be a Southern gentleman which brought status and power, and who are the two greatest Virginia gentlemen? Washington and Lee.
Ty Seidule:
I think the best way of seeing that finishing school is to actually look inside of Lee Chapel and it's where my first experience at W&L, Washington & Lee, and my last experience were both in that chapel.
Ty Seidule:
As you walk in, it looks like a chapel except if you look for Christian imagery, it's called Lee Chapel. Most chapels aren't named after Confederate generals but this one is. If you go in, it's got pews, it's got all that. But then if you look up on the stage, it has a stage, there's no pulpit, nothing to list the hymnals, no cross instead there's an... But it does have an apse, a sanctuary.
Ty Seidule:
I was raised Episcopalian. I was Episcopalian acolyte for many years. I understand my Christian imagery.
Ty Seidule:
There is an altar there. A white marble altar. But lying on top of the altar is Lee. I'm not saying that it's Lee in Confederate uniform lying in repose, asleep on, taking a nap on the battlefield. The blanket covering everything except for his feet and on his right hand is over his heart saying, "I'm going to do my duty," left hand on the scabbard of his sword saying, "I'm ready to rise up to fight again." Who is he going to fight for? The white people of the South to support white supremacy, to support the slave system. And so that is what it is.
Ty Seidule:
There's a little plaque there that says here's where General Lee sat. Down below is his crypt. There's an office where unchanged since he died in 1870. There's even outside... What it is it's like a reliquary.
Ty Seidule:
I was stationed in Italy for a number of years and all the churches there particularly the ones in the Southern Italy have these relics, the bones of saints, the way that you would... And then you see these old men and women whisper to the bones and it goes back to the pagan era of asking for whatever they want.
Ty Seidule:
It's the same way here and down... They even had the relic of an animal bones. Traveller, his war steed, was actually buried outside to show that they would... The way that you would do it, you leave apples and carrots for Traveller. Traveller's bones, it was close to his master.
Ty Seidule:
When I left W&L, I was commissioned there so I went up on stage to get [inaudible 00:27:01] in my green uniform and I saw a picture of me... By the way, readers, listeners, I'm bald man. Then though I had this glorious head of '80s hair, it was awesome.
Ty Seidule:
I was right there by the picture of Lee and then this glowing, reverential portrait of him in Confederate gray and then I went and grabbed my commission by this Lost Cause statue, the recumbent Lee, surrounded by Confederate flags. I went back down into the pew, raised my right hand, and gave the oath of office.
Ty Seidule:
Many of you have heard that oath of office, the same one that everyone in the federal government takes whether it's senate, house, officers, anybody, civilians, anybody, they take the same oath. I just took it again when I joined the commission on confederate designation.
Ty Seidule:
I love the oath and it says, "Support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic."
Ty Seidule:
Who are those domestic? It was confederates. This oath was written in 1862 as an anti-Confederate oath and I took it surrounded by Confederate flags.
Ty Seidule:
I went to a school that not just revered Lee. He was called St. Bob. He was worshiped. He was literally a symbol that was stronger than Jesus at that school.
Josh King:
Clouded by this literal altar to the Lost Cause was the fact that the predecessor of the school of Washington Academy was the first to have an African American graduate in the country. But it took over a century for a black person to graduate under the Washington and Lee name. How did General Lee and the Lost Cause ideology that sprung up around him find such a home at that place?
Ty Seidule:
It was Washington College. Washington gave James River stock, canal stock to Washington College and that really say... They started the school. It was Liberty Hall Academy then they renamed it after him because of this gift. It was Washington College. And then Lee, unbelievably accepted to be president of this college in 1865 after the Civil War. He didn't have a real job after the war and he said, "Well, education will be where I make my name."
Ty Seidule:
He went to this school and really revitalized it, brought in money, and was, I think, an innovative educator. He had been superintendent college president at West Point previously. When he dies in 1870, the faculty immediately renamed it Washington and Lee University. And then it start... Really, Lee is part of this Lost Cause myth. He is part of it himself, he starts it as well. But when he dies, the school wraps themselves around him and they do this for 100 years.
Ty Seidule:
If your belief that Lee is the greatest man, the greatest human that ever lived then his cause must be good as well and his cause was abominable. But if you believe he is the greatest man who ever lived, his cause is the greatest then you believe in a white supremacist view of society which means you are going to be the last to integrate and W&L is, along with VMI, among the very last schools to integrate.
Josh King:
Back to your own journey through all of this, Ty, while you were stationed at Fort Bragg, you met your wife, Shari, how did the two of you meet? And how did she push you to examine in much greater detail your own life story?
Ty Seidule:
Well, I met her... So I was stationed at Fort Bragg, North Carolina a young captain in the paratrooper 82nd Airborne Division wearing a maroon beret and there are very few things I like more cocky than a beret wearing paratrooper and I was at that time. She worked for a boutique investment bank in New York, she worked in Manhattan.
Ty Seidule:
Her dad was a West Point graduate and she came down and saw me and I was trying to impress her with... Because she was [inaudible 00:30:45]. She's just fantastic person. I told her about the southern stuff because that's who I was and she's looking at me like, "What is wrong with you?"
Ty Seidule:
But what turns out is I grew up on these lies. As a military brat and just because of who she is, she cannot lie. She just can't do it and she saw through my lies. It took me years before I listened to her but this finally came to fruition in the chapel when I took her there for the first time and she saw the altar and she said, "Oh, my God. Lee is the altar. Get me out of here."
Ty Seidule:
Really through her example, I learned to tell the truth and the book is dedicated to her because, her name is Shari, she taught me how to tell the truth and as a Southern man, I grew up learning to lie.
Josh King:
Despite these eye opening questions that you got from Shari, earning a PhD in history, traveling the world these various assignments and stations that you had, it really wasn't until your second stationing at West Point back in the Hudson River Valley that you were confronted with the antithesis in worshipping Lee and serving your country. What was the epiphany that you had? And how did that lead you to reassess your really entire understanding of General Lee and the impact of the Lost Cause on the military?
Ty Seidule:
The first time I was at West Point, I was there '94 to '97, and I was still... I was teaching that the Civil War was about slavery but I could still hold in my mind, Civil War's about slavery but Lee is still worthy of reverence. But between those two times, my identity changed. I became an army officer and my marriage influenced me. And then when I came back, all these things coalesce.
Ty Seidule:
One day I was walking, and for those of you that have been to West Point, our barracks are named after the greatest heroes in American history. I walked by Eisenhower Barracks, like our dormitories, Eisenhower Barracks and then Pershing Barracks for World War I and then Grant, Ulysses Grant, Barracks and then there's Lee Barracks. I stopped and looked at the sign that said, Lee Barracks. I just looked it for 30 seconds.
Ty Seidule:
And then I look east about 20 yards and there was a new monument put up, a three foot monument, a bust of Lee in Confederate gray and I went over look at that. I just said, "Why are there so many things at the United States Military Academy named after Lee?" I understood Washington & Lee. I didn't get this. I went running all over campus. Posts, we call it, the Army post, looking for things and I must found more than a dozen things named after Lee and Confederacy and I wanted to know why. Nobody could tell me, nobody ever researched this before. So I went into the archives. I'm a historian. I know how to do this. and what I found shocked me.
Ty Seidule:
What I found was I thought that they would have named all these things in 1870 right after he died and the bond of West Point would have brought them together. Oh, hell no. I was completely wrong. In the 19th century, West Point banished confederacy from their collective memory. No Confederates buried in the West Point Cemetery. None on our great monument, battle monument, a 70 foot high column, none in our memorial hall. In fact, duty, honor, country, our great motto was written in 1898. Country, anti-Confederate. So when did they come? So that was my next point. When did these things come?
Ty Seidule:
Lee comes back in 1930s. Why 1930s? Well, that's when we bring black cadets back to West Point for the first time in the 20th century. It's a reaction to integration just like it was for me in Alexandria. I looked at this great portrait of Lee in Confederate gray with an enslaved servant in the background. By the way, that's another [inaudible 00:34:32] language. We don't call them slave, enslaved servant or enslaved worker. It's not who they are. It's who they're somebody's forcing them to be.
Ty Seidule:
But then that went also 1950s when the army is being forced to integrate and doesn't want to, and then Lee Barracks 1970 when minority admission starts and we go from a handful of black cadets to dozens and this just... Oh my gosh, they're named in reaction to integration and this ticked me off so much that that's what... It was the archive that changed me, it was the facts that changed me, it was the fact that I was now identified as something other than a Southern gentleman, all these things coalesce. And finally, I just could not take it anymore. And then I had to say something about it.
Josh King:
Your writing reveals some of the lesser known heroes such as Representative Oscar De Priest, who along with Benjamin O. Davis, Jr., forced West Point to integrate in the 1930s. Do you hope that along with the emphasizing Confederates who stood against the nation that history is going to begin to focus more on people like them?
Ty Seidule:
Oh, I do. I have one in every chapter because I need heroes. Everybody needs heroes and it turns out the hero of my youth, Robert E. Lee, was not. But I found... One example is Samuel Tucker from Alexandria.
Ty Seidule:
Tucker had to walk 20 blocks to catch a street train to go into D.C. to go to high school because Alexandria had nowhere where he could go to high school. Then he went to Howard University named after West Point grad and my dad and then couldn't get into law school because no white school would take him. So he passed the law exam anyway and started a sit-in movement in the 1930s to desegregate the Alexandria public school.
Ty Seidule:
I knew nothing about him growing up. He's my hero. And then he fought in World War II as an officer, brilliant combat record, and then took part in Brown versus Board of Education. He was one of those lawyers. Samuel Tucker is my hero and in fact, there is a school named after him now in Alexandria.
Ty Seidule:
It's the same way with B. O. Davis, Jr., Benjamin O. Davis, Jr., the toughest, best cadet that ever went through West Point. He was silenced his whole four years, physical torture to place as isolated as West Point, and yet he still graduated. I have heroes. They're just different than the ones this white boy grew up with in the South.
Ty Seidule:
We Americans have incredible people who fought for their country, who fought for... Thomas Jefferson said the words, "Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness," but he never lived them. He was a slaver who raped and slave women.
Ty Seidule:
But Benjamin O. Davis, Jr., Samuel Tucker, Oscar De Priest, they live those values. And one more, I'd say Ted DeLaney at Washington and Lee who at 18 was went to a segregated black school in Virginia, got a job on the ground as a custodian in the biology department in Washington and Lee University in the early 1960s. Twenty years later, he graduated then eventually got his PhD in history, went back and became a senior professor before retiring 57 years later as a professor. Ted DeLaney is my hero. I have plenty of heroes. They're just not confederates.
Josh King:
A new Legion of heroes. After the break, Ty Seidule, professor emeritus of history at West Point and I will discuss his current work with the commission responsible for renaming 10 bases that bear Confederate names and the history of the real Robert E. Lee. That's all coming up right after this.
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Josh King:
Welcome back before the break, Ty Seidule, professor emeritus of history at West Point and I were discussing how he came to terms with the conflict that arose when he began to examine the impact of the Lost Cause ideology both on himself and American history.
Josh King:
Ty, your wife urged you to share your own conversion story that led you from writing Lee above Jesus to publishing a book with the seminal chapter titled My Verdict: Robert E. Lee Committed Treason to Preserve Slavery. What was your process to balance the weight of centuries of history with your own biography?
Ty Seidule:
I think that I have to tell a story. You'll notice that I can't give you an answer without telling you a story. That's just the way I roll.
Ty Seidule:
I was chair of the memorialization committee at West Point and we were going to create a... This is really the reason why I wrote the book is because I tried to convince them to not honor confederates. So what happened was, we had lost 100 graduates, killed in the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. West Point was really reeling from this loss of the section 36 of our cemetery. We buried them all the time. I have 12 people that I taught that are buried there.
Ty Seidule:
I had this idea to create a new room that would have the 1500 graduates that killed since the war of 1812 through the War on Terror in one place. And everything, I got the money for it, I got everybody's blessing, it was going to be great. But then it was like, "Which names go in?" I argued that those who fought for the Confederacy should not go in our memorial, who died for the Confederacy but who graduated from West Point should not go in there.
Ty Seidule:
What I did was I went and I wrote up a paper on this and then I breathed all of our leadership on it. I said that we cannot honor confederates because they abrogated their oath, they killed U.S. Army soldiers, they fought to destroy their country for the worst possible reason to create a slave republic and the building that we're putting him in named after this guy, George Washington Cullum, actually made federal law when he made it to say, "No unworthy subjects go in there." He said, "I will never forgive those who forgot the flag to follow false gods."
Ty Seidule:
I went in there and I gave this argument. You can tell. I'm an enthusiastic arguer. I gave what I thought was the right argument and a righteous one. A blizzard of facts, a barrage of facts. Yet I convinced no one.
Ty Seidule:
I went to go talk to my wife about this, about why I lost. She said, "Ty, you got to tell your story, too. You can't just tell the story. The facts aren't enough. You've got to bring yourself into it." And that's when I said, "Okay, maybe I'm going to do this." So I did.
Ty Seidule:
I tested this out to say half Ty, half history. And when I did it, it had an enormous effect of making people particularly old white men like me to understand that they was okay for them to believe something else because here was I was doing it, somebody who spent a lifetime in uniform, somebody who had a PhD in history, I was being honest enough to say, "I grew up with these lies, too. You don't have to."
Ty Seidule:
When I gave this talk in a couple places and did that, they would come up and whisper to me afterwards, "Ty, I grew up that way too." I knew then that I had a story that I would resonate in a way that most historians don't. Listen, historians don't do memoirs. They just don't, it's not in our training, and yet we have the skills to do it better.
Josh King:
Let's put on the actual military historian hat for a second here because despite Jubal Early's version of Robert E. Lee's military prowess that has long been taken verbatim, you really put Lee on the shortlist of U.S. military leaders who lost a war. Putting aside slavery for a minute, what's your analysis of his military prowess and the supposed nobility of his surrender?
Ty Seidule:
In the first part of my teaching military history, I was often seduced by the smell of gunpowder. I would only talk about the X's and O's of military history which are important. It's important for future army officers, it's important for American citizens to understand military operations because we spend so much on defense. The American public has to understand military history. I love that part of military history.
Ty Seidule:
So I don't do it all that much but I do do some which is, Lee was revered in the South and by his soldiers. He certainly got more out of his soldiers than any other general wearing gray. He had a series of really great victories over larger forces against generals like McClellan, Pope, Burnside, Hooker. He did best them over and over and over again until he didn't, until he ran in to a general who was in my opinion the best general ever to wear U.S. Army blue and that is Ulysses S. Grant.
Ty Seidule:
Grant had a better political, strategic, operational, and tactical abilities than did Lee, than did anybody who's ever worn blue in the United States Army in my opinion. Unbelievable soldier.
Ty Seidule:
The fact of the matter is when Lee ran up against somebody better than him, he lost and he didn't just lose by a little bit. He was crushed. Destroyed. The entire United States army, remember not Union Army, the entire U.S. Army was running ramshod throughout the South. First, Grant did that through Mississippi and Tennessee, then Sherman did that through Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina, Sheridan did that through the Shenandoah Valley. There was no part of the South that didn't feel the hard hand of war.
Ty Seidule:
This was an army that was as defeated as any army has ever been, ever, and yet, we say that Lee was the greatest military genius of all time. Well, I'm sorry, he's got a big fat L on his forehead. If you look at the win-loss column, zero and one. He was lost. And he didn't just lose a little bit.
Ty Seidule:
So the idea that he's... And this what Jubal Early, who was one of his lieutenants during the war said is that Lee is like the Great Pyramid on the Nile Valley. In other words, he was great but didn't have any support. Whereas Grant was a pygmy on the top of Mount Everest or something meaning that he was that good. It does show might of the U.S. Well, that's another part of the Lost Cause myth.
Ty Seidule:
Remember that the South also lost because, one, it had slavery and every time the US Army went anywhere enslaved people left, escaped as much as they could, and then started fighting for the United States and supporting the war effort on that side because they were terrible. They had fewer... Why did the South have fewer immigrants? Because who wants to compete with slave labor. They all go into the north.
Ty Seidule:
The reason they lost because they weren't as good, they weren't as tactically sound, they had a terrible cause, and yes, they had fewer things. But they knew that going in and many of smaller power has won a war despite not having as much. Remember that the South had to do was not lose, the North had to win and the South could have easily... They had won some other battles, they could have won this as late as 1864 if Lincoln had not been reelected at 1864, if Sherman had not taken Atlanta. This was very much up in the air as late as 1864 about who was going to win this, and Lee lost decisively.
Ty Seidule:
So the idea that he was a great military commander and yet lost that badly, I'm not buying it. He certainly did not have the same strategic capacity that Grant did to see the entire war as well. But if those three lost cigars had not been lost at the Battle of Antietam and McClellan did not know where he was, he could have possibly have won that battle. He knew McClellan wasn't going to fight. He knew his enemy. Going up into Gettysburg, the idea that Meade was going to be the one fighting there wasn't set until a couple of days before the fight started.
Ty Seidule:
There are what ifs that could have happened, should have happened on the strategic side and there are many people that take the idea that go with those two attacks into the North were ill fated.
Ty Seidule:
But what I like to talk about is what he did on those two which is that as he was going North, he kidnapped free black citizens and escaped enslaved people, and every part every core within his army took those and brought them back into Virginia for sale. His army and that his use of his slave labor throughout the war was huge and tried to do it more and more and more and he's got many things that he wrote about of trying to use more in slave labor.
Ty Seidule:
I want to focus on the things that people haven't seen because listen, the idea of whether he won or lost now completely clear. He was crushed. We think of Grant as being... When I grew up, he was a butcher and a drunk. Well, no. This is the greatest, I will say it again, the greatest soldier to have ever worn U.S. Army blue in the history of this nation. He captured three armies and as clear a writing as you can ever imagine, as clear in understanding, as calm, imperturbable on the battlefield and he clearly understood what his boss Lincoln wanted and delivered.
Ty Seidule:
If you want a hero, go find and read anything about Ulysses S. Grant. He's our hero not Lee.
Josh King:
Let's bring one other general into the conversation, Ty. Your book rejects honor and duty to Virginia as a legitimate argument for Lee's defection from the United States Army. You also point out that not only did his mentor General Winfield Scott rally troops to defend Washington, D.C. and ensure the inauguration of Abraham Lincoln, a topic that we discussed a few weeks ago with Ted Widmer, but any way you look at it, the math does not shed Lee in a good light.
Ty Seidule:
Yes. My bumper sticker... If you remember one thing from my book, it should be Robert E. Lee chose treason to preserve slavery. Everyone to me, that's what the Confederates did. Treason. So why do I say treason? And I think Robert E. Lee committed treason because Article III, Section 3 of the United States Constitution has only one crime in it and that crime is levying war against the United States and it has to have two witnesses.
Ty Seidule:
Did Lee levy war against the United States? Unequivocably. He was indicted for treason after the war. For a bunch of different reasons, he was not tried but he was indicted and as a historian I can say, clearly, that he committed treason because of this.
Ty Seidule:
The second question then, is did he have to do it? And Lee's Pulitzer Prize winning biographer Douglas Southhall Freeman said, "It was the decision he was born to make." This is Lost Cause propaganda. And when I went back and counted them, they were eight U.S. Army colonels from Virginia by the time Virginia seceded in May of 1861. Eight. Total of eight, all West Point graduates. Seven or 88% remain loyal to the United States. That's not including the generals like Winfield Scott or Montgomery Max. They stayed loyal and because many things like a West Point education and others would have said that it's a national institution.
Ty Seidule:
He chose treason when many others stayed, including his family, many members of the Lee remained loyal, including his sister, including cousins, best friends, and many other people. In fact, he was the first in his family to choose treason earlier than his sons. Even his wife initially was a unionist. So why did he do that?
Ty Seidule:
I argue that he did it for the same reason that the South did it. To preserve slavery and extend it. In 1857, he was granted two and a half years of paid administrative leave by his boss, Winfield Scott, and he left his regiment in Texas, went back to Arlington plantation or as I call it slave labor farm. Remember, plantation is a site of mass atrocities. He controlled that for two and a half years.
Ty Seidule:
During that time, his father-in-law who he took it over from recognized enslaved marriages and did not break families apart for profit. Lee did. He broke all but one family apart in the hiring system to maximize profits. He ordered the whipping of enslaved people where his father-in-law never did. We have just absolute eyewitness account of the person who was whipped that he actually did that and was told to pour salt water on it. The enslaved people that suffered under him called him a cruel, cruel slave owner.
Ty Seidule:
And then in 1863 after the Emancipation Proclamation, he said, "We've got to fight harder to preserve our social system," meaning slavery, "to ensure that our families are polluted," by that he meant [inaudible 00:52:31] that black men were going to rape white women when in fact what we have is clear evidence that it was white man who raped enslaved women over and over and over again.
Ty Seidule:
So what Robert E. Lee did was commit treason when no one else did in his circumstances, there were very few, the senior officers, and he did it because he's a such a firm believer in slavery.
Josh King:
In Robert E. Lee and Me, Ty, you also explore the biographies of several men beyond Lee whose names can be found on military bases today, Pierre Beauregard stands out not just for leading the attack on Fort Sumter but also serving [inaudible 00:53:09] as the West Point commandant. How did he end up with not just a base but also a road on the West Point campus?
Ty Seidule:
Yeah, well, Beauregard... So yes, [inaudible 00:53:18]. I love that.
Ty Seidule:
He came to West Point and finagled a job for five days from an outgoing secretary of war who was another treasonous person who ended up going through the South. He went up there so that... He knew he did it because he would get promoted to colonel and that way he could get higher rank in the Confederate army.
Ty Seidule:
He's up there for five days and counseled cadets when they should commit sedition and leave the United States and he was fired after five days for sedition. He brought his enslaved servants up there. He left one enslaved servant back who had just given birth to his child because he raped enslaved women. He was only there for five days and then went back to the South and had the cheek to actually ask the U.S. government to pay his expenses and his enslaved servants as he went to go fight against the United States. He was at Fort Sumter and order the first shots fired, the first general officer in the Confederate Army.
Ty Seidule:
And yet in the 1930s, they named a road after him and also a base's named after him. We named bases... They're 10 to 12 depending on how you count them, bases' name after Confederates and they were named in World War I and World War II when the U.S. Army was a white supremacist organization, segregated black officers, there were only a handful of them could not command white soldiers and because of that, we only listen to white Southern politicians who were...
Ty Seidule:
Remember, the South was a racial police state during this time. One party in power, racial police state, and the army wanted to ensure, one, that it was listening to them because they control the purse string and two, the army wanted to stay white segregationist organization as well.
Ty Seidule:
So we named these bases during that time to ensure white supremacy, also to appease white politicians, and because that's the way the army was during this time. And Beauregard, there's Camp Beauregard in Louisiana today.
Josh King:
Beauregard's not all that well known and maybe that plays a role in how certain names endure. For example, Virginia's 116th Infantry Brigade Combat Team traces itself back to Stonewall Jackson's brigade but we removed their uniforms reference to the Confederate in 2007. At the same time, Kentucky's first battalion, the 623rd Field Artillery Regiment traces its lineage to the lesser known John Morgan and has been allowed to continue to use the name Morgan's men.
Ty Seidule:
Yes. The one that I studied was the Fourth Alabama of the 167th Infantry Regiment and again, scratch these organizations and you end up finding a link to segregation.
Ty Seidule:
In '19, sometime... I think it's 1971, Fourth Alabama inputs 13 stars for their Confederate use into their heraldry. And then in 1982, '83, they had the title Fourth Alabama which fought at Gettysburg was their lineage but they only do this in the 1970s and '80s is when they add this. Again, these are things that aren't something that come up immediately. They're done away with a rule or one and they seep back in during this time.
Ty Seidule:
Let me just tell you one other story about one of these Confederate names is Fort Gordon which is home of Army Cyber and Army Signal named after John Brown Gordon. It's both named in World War I then goes away and comes back in World War II. Gordon once said... He was a brave fighter for the Confederates. Never wore U.S. Army blue. We named a post after him that never served in the U.S. Army. He once told black Charlestonians that if you demand equality, so this is in 1868, three years after the war, the 40 million of us white people will exterminate the four million of you in a race war and then he lead the KKK.
Ty Seidule:
These bases are named after terrible people who fought for things that are not the values that we hold today anyway.
Josh King:
Not the values that we hold today, Ty. [Michael Paradis 00:57:23], a past guest of this show and a friend of yours, explained on the podcast we did with him that often the Confederate names were used by the U.S. Federal Government to make Southern states just a generation or two removed from reconstruction maybe more comfortable with the military installation in their communities or more comfortable enlisting at a time when we needed more men to fight World War I and World War II. Is it that simple or is there more to the story?
Ty Seidule:
Well, there is more to the story. Part of it is, remember when we say the South, remember that states like Mississippi and Georgia and South Carolina were nearly 50% black. When we say that it's to appease Southerners it's because the South was a racial police state. Black people had no vote. They had no participation. They did up until 1890s. There was a black senator from Mississippi. Two thousand black men served in various elected offices up to the 1890s. And then these white, "Redeemer governments," they changed the constitution of all the Southern states to exclude black people.
Ty Seidule:
When we named these in World War I, World War II, there is plenty of black protests, lots of black protests, but they have no political power so they don't get to do it. And the Army is also part of this problem. So when we go fight in World War I, there are two segregated black divisions, one of which Pershing gives one division to the French and only one it's the 93rd Division and it fights brilliantly. It includes the Harlem Hellfighters, famous unit. The 92nd we keep and they are never allowed to train together.
Ty Seidule:
Southern officers are their officers because suppose they know how to control black troops and they don't fight as well. They fight okay. One regiment doesn't in one battle and the army uses that as a reason to not do integration World War II.
Ty Seidule:
In fact, I read all the background on this and there's actually a planning document that the army writes that says that "The Negro soldier is not equal to the white soldier because the Negro race is not the same as the white race." It's so racist. They don't believe that black people are fully human and that's the way the army believe... This is 1932 less than 100 years ago that we're saying this.
Ty Seidule:
The reason that we named these is because both the army and society is so inherently racist that the names support that white supremacist view of society.
Josh King:
Michael Paradis reached out to us a couple months after he did the show with us to alert us to the fact that your book was now out and that you had been appointed to the commission that was announced under the Trump administration and now refreshed under our new secretary of defense, Lloyd Austin, to review the bases bearing names linked to the Confederacy.
Josh King:
You also published a Washington Post op-ed, maybe almost a year ago, July 2020, with your suggested names to replace them. Can you update us on where the commission stands? And have you presented the names? And how close are we to seeing changes to these base names and removal of the monuments that are on them?
Ty Seidule:
The commission has been met. I think tomorrow's our third meeting. I'm enjoying participation in it. Huge honor for me to participate in something that I have studied for such a long period of my life. The great honor to raise my right hand and take the oath to join federal service again.
Ty Seidule:
We have not come to any conclusions about what those things are going to be renamed to. But the committee is getting such an incredible diverse group of amazing people including Michelle Howard, the first woman to be admiral and the black woman to be an admiral in the Navy, the former commandant of the Marine Corps. We had some just incredible people on there.
Ty Seidule:
I'm not really at liberty to talk about what we're doing yet except that we're going to get after it. We are going to get after it and it is the honor of my life to be able to serve on a commission that is going to do the work that we have been tasked by the National Defense Authorization Act.
Ty Seidule:
And what I really appreciate about that is that when Trump vetoed the National Defense Authorization Act which created a commission to rename these posts, and that's what it's called, that a super majority of Republicans, Democrats in both the House and the Senate overrode President Trump's veto. So this has incredible bipartisan support to be able to do that and that makes me very proud of my country.
Ty Seidule:
I also know from talking to army leadership... This isn't a completely army problem. But it's mainly an army problem, both the army and West Point are anxious for the commission to do its work and to get these things renamed so that it represents the values of America today and the values of the U.S. military today and not those of when they were named in World War I and World War II.
Josh King:
When the Military Times conducted a poll last year, it found that seven out of 10 service members favored banning these Confederate symbols and paraphernalia from all defense department locations. Only half wanted to rename the bases. Why do you think it is? And are you meeting resistance from the services as you and your fellow commission members do your work?
Ty Seidule:
Well, we have some work to do to explain to them why there... When you hear Bragg, Bragg is the center of the military universe. The 82nd Airborne Division is there, the 18th Airborne Corps is there, Army Special Operations forces are there. People are so proud to be stationed there because the mission is so good.
Ty Seidule:
But they don't know is that Bragg was someone who... Not only was he a terrible... Not only did he fight for slavery, in fact, left the army and bought both a slave plantation and slave labor farm and had enslaved people there which he sent young children out to the farm. I read the statements on this. Then during the Civil War, he was a terrible general. Just awful.
Ty Seidule:
We named this after somebody who was a slaver, committed treason, and was a terrible general. We have to explain who Bragg was, why that we named it after him, terrible reasons why we did, and then we have the opportunity to name it after a true American hero. Someone who fought for their nation, someone who was in... I don't know who that's going to be. But you gave me an hour, I will give you 12 names. You give me another hour, I'll give you another 12 names and another. I could go on as long as you have time to listen to me about the great people that have served.
Ty Seidule:
We had some work to do to explain to the troops why we're doing this and who they are named for. And then when we eventually choose it, who we are naming it for.
Josh King:
Let's talk a little bit about that extra work that we're going to do as we wrap up our conversation, Ty, because renaming bases and removing monuments is this very visual step in correcting how the events of the Civil War are commemorated. But we're boots on the ground literally what needs to happen next?
Ty Seidule:
I think racism is the virus in the American dirt. It goes from sea to shining sea. It's so ubiquitous, it's everywhere that it's hard to see it anywhere. I think what we have to do first, and I'm a historian so that's where it is, first, we have to identify why we are like we are.
Ty Seidule:
We have to identify why black families have 1/10th of wealth of white families. This goes from many things in military. The VA loans didn't cover black houses. Segregation was created in the 20th century to prevent black families from owning homes. Social Security did not include black families when it was first created. The G.I. Bill didn't include black people. So there's a reason why we are like we are. The interstate system went through and destroyed black housing areas, black neighborhoods when it was put in. So we have to understand our history.
Ty Seidule:
The only way to prevent a racist future is to first understand our racist past. If we want to know where they were going, we've got to know where we've been. Nobody fixes problems better than Americans once we have identified them, know what they are, and I believe in this country, I love my country, that two thirds of my life in its service, and if they ever need an old soldier, again, I'm here. But we have problems in this country that we can fix if we first identify them, understand what the historical context is, and then go about trying to make policies that fix them.
Josh King:
Your website, as we wrap up, Ty, includes a guide of what to do if your street, high school, or college bears the name of a Confederate. We've concentrated on these large actions federal and state institutions have taken, will continue to take. But is it going to take a national grassroots campaign to complete the decommemoration of the Confederacy?
Ty Seidule:
The thing about... Let me give you an example of that. In Hungary, after the wall came down and they had these statues of Lenin, Marx, Engels, Stalin all over the place. What did they do? They move them all to one park on the outskirts of Budapest. You can go to Budapest and see just this weird thing where all... Have you been there?
Josh King:
No, but I've seen things about it.
Ty Seidule:
Yeah, yeah. It's crazy. But we can't do that. The reason we can't do that is because we're a federal system. Many of these were put up by local state, cities, counties, and in fact, many of them were put up by the Marietta Marble Company in the South which went to each town and said, "Hey, you don't have your Confederate monument. City A over there's got it, where's yours?" And they sold this. The only way to get it down is by local towns doing the work for this.
Ty Seidule:
What we do have to do is the state governments can't prevent local governments from doing this. And hey, Tennessee, I'm looking at you and Alabama and others have created laws that prevent local communities from moving these out. My own State of Virginia is leading the league in this. They are doing great work by allowing towns to do this so for years, Alexandria couldn't remove their Confederate statue put up in 1889 because the State of Virginia wouldn't allow them. Now, Governor Northam, who's done an amazing job with this, they change that law and Alexandria took it down, no problem.
Ty Seidule:
But local communities have to decide what they want to do about these. And if there are laws that prevent that, those laws must change.
Josh King:
Well, the laws have a long way to go to change fully. But thanks to the work that you've done in your book. We have certainly begun this debate in earnest. The work of the commission will tell us probably later in the year what's going to happen to the bases and we appreciate so much the work that you're doing to treat all of us as members of your classroom. Ty Seidule, thank you so much for joining us Inside the ICE House.
Ty Seidule:
My pleasure. I had a great time talking to you. Thank you so much.
Josh King:
And that's our conversation for this week. Our guest was Ty Seidule, professor emeritus of history at the United States Military Academy at West Point.
Josh King:
If you liked what you heard, please rate us on iTunes so other folks know where to find us. And if you've got a comment or a question you'd like one of our experts to tackle on a future show, email us at ICE House at ice.com or tweet at us @ICEHousePodcast.
Josh King:
Our show is produced by Pete Asch with production assistants from [Brian Hopkins 01:09:30] and Ian Wolf. I'm Josh King, your host, signing off from the library of the New York Stock Exchange. Thanks for listening. We'll talk to you next week.
Speaker 1:
Information contained in this podcast was obtained in part from publicly available sources and not independently verified. Neither ICE nor his affiliates make any representations or warranties expressed or implied as to the accuracy or completeness of the information and do not sponsor, approve, or endorse any of the content herein. All of which is presented solely for informational and educational purposes. Nothing herein constitutes an offer to sell or solicitation of an offer to buy any security or a recommendation of any security or trading practice. Some portions of the proceeding conversation may have been edited for the purpose of length or clarity.
