Two minutes of lost footage From "The Civil War"

[struggle4progress]

Jeffrey Kluger
4:42 PM ET

... the .. Ken Burns film .. just celebrated its twenty-fifth anniversary ... As part of the promotion, the producers released a tiny snip of outtake footage ... The clip opens with .. Burns asking Foote, “Why did Americans kill each other in such extraordinary numbers for four years? Why did this beautiful country break down?” The answer .. is .. complex and troubling. “There are so many reasons that can be assigned after the fact,” Foote says, “slavery being the main one, and that’s Lincoln’s identification of the problem” ... Foote was a child of Mississippi, born in 1916, only 51 years after the war ended. For that demographic, slavery was indeed Lincoln’s identification of the problem ... But .. slavery was the South’s own reason ...

http://time.com/4067892/civil-war-ken-burns/

[SheilaT]

1. Here's what really stands out to me:

That the south didn't like the changes they saw to the government. Presidents had always been from the south to begin with, and when that changed they didn't like it.

That's actually an amazing insight, and one that I think applies today. The self-identified Tea Partiers and their ilk see changes they don't like. Plus, of course, they're totally delusional about all sorts of things, including how wonderful things used to be, but the point is they see themselves as fighting back terrible changes in our government and way of life.

[packman]

2. I've read all of Footes books and it is difficult for me to assign him

any tinge of bigotry in his writings. What he said to Burns seems to be a legitimate observation. Perhaps one's sensitivity meter is atoned too high.

[struggle4progress]

3. He's a good read but his analysis is thoroughly based in the Lost Cause mythology

that he learned as a child at the height of the white supremacy movement in the 1920s

... I would fight for the Confederacy today if the circumstances were similar. There’s a great deal of misunderstanding about the Confederacy, the Confederate flag, slavery, the whole thing. The political correctness of today is no way to look at the middle of the nineteenth century. The Confederates fought for some substantially good things ...

Shelby Foote, The Art of Fiction No. 158
Interviewed by Carter Coleman, Donald Faulkner, William Kennedy
The Paris Review
Summer 1999