Introduction

When I was in grade school my classmates and I sang "Old Folks at Home" (also known as "Swanee River"; that’s how I knew it.) Swanee River is a minstrel song written by Stephen Foster in 1851. Since 1935 it has been the official state song of Florida, although in 2008 the original lyrics were revised.

Here is the chorus from this 1851 song:

“All de world am sad and dreary,

Eb-rywhere I roam;

Oh, darkeys, how my heart grows weary,

Far from de old folks at home!”

Stephen Foster, is known as “The Father of American Music” because of the many lyrical and extremely popular songs he wrote, including "Camptown Races", "My Old Kentucky Home", "Jeanie with the Light Brown Hair", and "Beautiful Dreamer". Foster used the Negro dialect of the day for the lyrics.

Should a song like this be sung today? No. Should we rip songs like this and the people who wrote and performed them from our history books, to be replaced by accusations of hate and racism? How about people like Robert E. Lee and Kate Smith? No. Not at all. Should we know and learn from our history--all of it? Yes. Of course. And that’s the topic of today’s 10-minute podcast.

Continuing

Let’s start the discussion by saying that we cannot learn from history if we do not understand it. Insert your favorite quote about learning from history here. That part is clear on its face, yes? And if we distort and twist that history before erasing it, things get even worse.

Here is today’s Key Point. And, yes, we are getting to it early. We need to know, to really get it, that people like Stephen Foster, Robert E. Lee and Kate Smith are not hard-core Nazis, KKK riders or even sad little David Duke. They are ordinary people, like you and me. The lesson we need to learn is how to be sufficiently educated, aware and caring to keep evolving as individuals and as a society. We need to be continually evolving and constantly improving. Tearing down statues and reputations while rewriting history books in an effort to make yesterday look like we think it should have been make that learning and evolving impossible. All of us, including the “tear it down” advocates, need to remember that the learning and evolving needs to continue forever. What we do today will be judged through the lens of history tomorrow. And don’t we want future generations to be learning and improving rather than accusing and tearing down the history we create?

I hold Robert E. Lee accountable for most of the death and destruction in the Civil War, a war that killed more Americans than all of our other wars put together. General Lee was asked by Abraham Lincoln to head the Union Army, but Lee refused, and proved the wisdom of Lincoln’s request by brilliantly leading the Confederates to victory after victory over the superior but poorly led Union forces. Lee’s mistake was in seeing his loyalty to his state, Virginia, as more important than his loyalty to the United states. At the end of the war, Lee petitioned to have his citizenship restored. Because of a clerical error, it never happened.

Kate Smith, had a radio, television, and recording career spanning five decades, which reached its pinnacle in the 1940s. Smith became known as “The Songbird of the South” after her enduring popularity during World War II. Later, sports teams including the Philadelphia Flyers and New York Yankees featured her. I remember how the Flyers thought that having her sing a ringing rendition of “God Bless America” before games was a lucky charm. Ms. Smith was the featured performer in tours that raised the equivalent of $10B (billion) in today’s dollars to fight Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan in WWII. Then came the news of her 1931 recordings of "That's Why Darkies Were Born" and "Pickaninny Heaven.