Robert E Lee and Me Rothdas book review RSS
4.0 Stars
4-20-2025

I went into this book with low expectations, since the basic idea of the book (The CSA was shitty) is a very easy historical and rhetorical target, and what more really needs to be said about it at this point? Also, the idea of being a Southerner/American/Blanco/Dude/Hominid and coming to terms with the layers and layers of bones that make up your history is again, something that we should all be pretty familiar with at this point. The author surprised me though. For one, he actually did have an early life that goes *right* down the line of white supremacy. E.g. going through one prep school/college/social group after another named after Lee, in a way that only a 100? 200? people a year ever do. So he really can speak from the experience of being raised right smack dab in the middle of white-supremacy culture. The book also had a number of interesting historical anecdotes (e.g. Lee accepting a promotion three weeks before quitting to join the CSA, boooo, even I have more honor than that), and roasts of the Southerners that various army bases were named after. It also supplied at least a few historical details about a phenomena that I've read about online, but had not actually read the details of, where politicians in the 1900's traded southern votes for progressive economic policies in exchange for bringing the Lost Cause culture back into the fold. E.g. stuff like FDR gaining some votes for social security or what not, in exchange for giving Southern Senators an army base name or allowing Confederate dead to be buried in Arlington.

Other modest factors that resulted in me liking this book: it is short (200 pages), and the author, a historian who I expected to be a David Brookish nebbish dough-ball, instead looks like a grizzled army ranger straight out of central casting. Maybe you don't need a continual supply of highly concentrated carbs in order to have a thinking mind? Curious. Anyway his head shot did make me like him better. So not a world-changing book, but still brief enough and interesting enough to be worth reading.