Many of these changes meet with my approval, and would be cheered on by liberals. Problematically positing that “culture decides truth,” Seidule sees it as his duty to help readjust the terms in the current culture wars. Lee and Me chronicles a young man emerging from the cognitive dissonance generated by the Lost Cause South and its class prejudice, the book also reflects the persistence of another class-based paradigm - real existing economic privilege. A “gentleman” would aspire to Lee’s namesake university, but would consider it vulgar to race his namesake 1969 Dodge Charger. One’s family “saw the army as a place for miscreants,” which included the grunts then in Nam or the gray-clad farmers who fought in Antietam. The Southern pecking order was always clear, even when it came to the military.
Those from the right homes were encouraged to become a “well-educated Southern gentleman” as well as a good “Christian.” Seidule attended Washington and Lee University: he sat in Lee Chapel, where you could see the Confederate general himself lying on the altar. It was still possible in the 1960s to aspire to the grandeur of cavalier gentility, to respect the glory of the fabled Old South.
It is an autobiography of a member of a class who has reached a high level of education and who has been invested in the order of things.
Still, it should be kept in mind that this is the autobiography of a white Southerner of a very specific class. Lee and Me - part autobiography, part history, part polemic - because his pro-renaming position drew considerable ire from some of his colleagues. Seidule’s appointment inspired the writing of Robert E. He is also one of four representatives of the Department of Defense who were selected for the so-called “Confederate Base Naming Commission,” mandated by Congress at the beginning of this year in the wake of the murder of George Floyd and subsequent unrest. He was also once the head of the United States Military Academy’s history department and West Point’s first professor emeritus of history. Ty Seidule is a retired US Army brigadier general. Lee and Me: A Southerner’s Reckoning with the Myth of the Lost Cause by Ty Seidule. This is a noble effort to reconcile with the Southern past, but are suggested changes in nomenclature - rather than statements of moral and political clarity - good enough?
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