Roll Over Picasso: Lee, Davis Still Rule Richmond By Dave Shiflett(Bloomberg)— They don’t commemorate wars like they used to – or at least the Civil War, whose sesquicentennial observance is under way in Richmond, Va., capital of the doomed confederacy. While the Picasso exhibit at the Virginia Museum for Fine Arts dominates local headlines, the “war of northern aggression,” as some traditionalists call the bloody conflict, still rules much of the city’s cultural landscape. Yet that landscape is definitely changing, says S. Waite Rawls III, president and CEO of The Museum of the Confederacy, which opened in 1896. “The centennial of the war was largely about re-enactments of battles,” he says, while this year the emphasis is on how the war affected women, children and the 4 million blacks who lived in the South at wartime, 3.6 million of whom were slaves. In the same spirit a state tourism website refers to the sesquicentennial as the “150th Anniversary of the American Civil War and Emancipation.” “It’s not just about white guys fighting,” adds Vickie R. Yates, head of the museum’s marketing and public relations department. There are painful reminders of enslavement and privation in new domestic-themed exhibits, including displays of rough cloth woven by slaves. Yet reminders of combat are never far away. There’s a dinner plate used by a Luray, Va. woman to bang a foraging union soldier over the head. “Put him out cold,” Yates says. There’s also a wartime textbook that includes this somewhat tendentious math problem: “If one Confederate soldier kills 90 Yankees, how many Yankees can 10 Confederate soldiers kill?” The tonal shift, while subtle to a casual observer, is raising serious hackles in some quarters. Roger McCredie, executive director of the Southern Legal Resource Center, which identifies itself as “a nonprofit organization that advocates on behalf of citizens involved in Southern heritage issues,” writes in an email that “it is already painfully clear that the sesquicentennial is going to be the apogee of thirty years' worth of South-bashing.” He adds that the “only acceptable way for Southerners to mention their Confederate heritage this time around is through self abasement and abject apology.” Rawls, who sports a bow tie and once worked for Chemical Bank in Manhattan, prefers to focus on the vast interest in the war, which stretches far beyond the Mason-Dixon Line. Twenty percent of museum visitors in January were from the UK, he says, and he smilingly recalls the day he was summoned to the museum’s front desk to meet a group of battle re-enactors from Stuttgart. “They said they have a hard time doing re-enactments in Germany,” he says, “because no one wants to play the part of the Yankees.” You don’t have to be a re-enactor to be awed and sometimes amused by some of the museum’s exhibits, including one challenging the popular story (in the North) that confederate president Jefferson Davis was wearing a dress when captured by Union troops. There’s also a handkerchief stained with what is believed to be the blood of the mortally wounded Stonewall Jackson. What would Stonewall think of the Picasso exhibit? “He probably would not attend,” Rawls responds. There’s also the uniform Robert E. Lee wore while surrendering to U.S. Grant. Yates points out that while Lee stood nearly six feet tall and weighed 180 pounds, his boots are a petite size 5. With the cocktail hour approaching, I was inspired to observe: “What, no flask?” According to Rawls, neither Jackson nor Lee were drinkers, quite unlike the victorious Gen. Grant. Visitors sometimes rub shoulders with contemporary eminences, including Ken Burns, who used the museum artifacts in his sprawling Civil War documentary, and Stephen Spielberg, who visited the adjacent White House of the Confederacy in November, Yates says, doing prep work for an upcoming movie on Abraham Lincoln -- still considered a war criminal by some of the southern faithful. While McCredie refers to Union troops as “an invading army” most southerners seem to have stacked their muskets long ago. Varina Davis, wife of the former CSA president, relocated to New York after her husband’s death, according to tour guide Dean Knight, and lived at the Hotel Gerard on W. 44th Street and wrote newspaper columns for Joseph Pulitzer’s “New York World.” Would Varina have gone to the Picasso exhibit? Yes, Rawls says, adding she was “thrilled to have Oscar Wilde” visit her post-war home. “But she probably wouldn’t have liked it.”
