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The End of the Myth: From the Frontier to the Border Wall in the Mind of America

Book by Greg Grandin · 3 quotes · Confederacy, Racism, American South

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The End of the Myth: From the Frontier to the Border Wall in the Mind of America Quotes

“Loss in Vietnam radicalized a generation of veterans, pushing many into the ranks of white-supremacist groups. Ronald Reagan, as the standard bearer of an ascendant New Right, effectively tapped into this radicalization, which helped lift him to victory in his 1980 presidential campaign. Once he was in office, Reagan's re-escalation of the Cold War allowed him to contain the radicalization, preventing it from spilling over (too much) into domestic politics. Anti-communist campaigns in Central America—a region Reagan called "our southern frontier"—were especially helpful in focusing militancy outward. But Reagan's Central American wars (which comprised support for the Contras in Nicaragua and death squads in El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras) generated millions of refugees, many, perhaps most, of whom fled to the United States. As they came over the border, they inflamed the same constituencies that Reagan had mobilized to wage the wars that had turned them into refugees in the first place.”

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“The Confederate flag stopped flying as the pennant of reconciliation, the joining of the southern military tradition to northern establishment might to spread Americanism abroad. It now was the banner of those who felt that the establishment had sacrificed that tradition, "stabbed it in the back." The battle flag became the banner not of a specific Lost Cause but of all of white supremacy's lost causes.”

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“The overseas frontier—wars in Cuba, the Dominican Republic, the Philippines, Nicaragua, and Haiti—acted as a prism, refracting the color line abroad back home. In each military occupation and prolonged counterinsurgency they fought, southerners could replay the dissonance of the Confederacy again and again. They could fight in the name of the loftiest ideals—liberty, valor, self-sacrifice, camaraderie—while putting down people of color.”

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Book:The End of the Myth: From the Frontier to the Border Wall in the Mind of America
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