There's a discussion going on at HNN over Edwin Yoder's review of John Coski's The Confederate Battle Flag. It is probably typical of the net that most participants appear not only not to have read Coski's book, but also not to have bothered reading the Yoder review to which they're theoretically responding.
I'm almost as well-credentialed to comment on this, since I haven't read Coski's book either. Unfortunately I have read Coski's essay "The Confederate Battle Flag in Historical Perspective" in the 2000 volume Confederate Symbols in the Contemporary South, which I assume the book is an expansion of. Tainted by knowledge of the subject, I'll have to limit myself to the observation that one of the reasons people get into such heated arguments over the flag is that the wide variation in its historical uses gives everyone some uniquely noble or despicable set of ideas to identify it with. Coski does an excellent job of listing each of these meanings, which makes it easier to see that a partisan's position may actually be correct, but will certainly be incomplete.
I think that while many white southerners revere the Old South, the majority of us want to. But venerating the southern past with a clean conscience requires us either to rewrite it or to concentrate on the slivers of southern history that are unambiguously noble. Harry Turtledove plays to the first desire in his alt-history sci-fi novel Guns of the South, in which a victorious President Lee rams an emancipation bill through the Confederate Congress before crushing a rebellion by his time-traveling Afrikaner suppliers. It's a magnificent way for the reader to cheer for a Confederate victory without having to grapple with the consequences of a Union defeat.
The second approach to the southern past can lead to real hair splitting, as it requires approval for Confederate symbols in some contexts with simultaneous denunciations of their use in others. David Hackett Fischer gets perilously close to this in the Massive Resistance chapter of his Liberty and Freedom:
Its rhetoric reached back to the iconography of southern independence in the Civil War. So also did its symbols. A modern revision of the old Confederate battle flag became the leading emblem of white supremacy and massive resistance. It claimed a kinship with Robert E. Lee, but this was not the old four-square "stainless banner" that had been carried with honor by the Army of Northern Virginia in the Civil War. This was something different, a twentieth-century polyester Jim Crow flag with rectangular proportions that were ironically closer to the Stars and Stripes than to the old Confederate battle flags. The southern flag of massive resistance was a new image, invented for a second civil war and quickly adopted by racist movements in many parts of the world.
It's certainly a stretch to claim that a 2:3 proportion makes this closer to the US flag than it is to this. This is especially surprising since Fischer has no sympathy for secession or segregation, putting right-wing secessionists in a rogues' gallery of the "conservative fringe of the Federalist Party" after 1800, the pro-slavery movement, "small bands of Communists and Fascists in the early twentieth century, and elements of the academic left in American universities during the late twentieth century" who "put themselves outside the broad tradition of liberty and freedom."
Posted by Ben Brumfield at May 26, 2005 12:57 PMI don't mind if private citizens fly the confederate flag (in it's various guises) off their front porches, on their rear automobile windows, or on their t-shirts (I do mind, really, but it's none of my business). I do mind if it's on public property, on state flags, and flying on courthouse lawns. Setting aside how it offends the black community, it's offensive in that it is a symbol of a movement that aimed at destroying the union and produced a horrific conflict that cost hundreds of thousands of lives. That it's also a symbol of a revisionist version of American history which has it that the peaceful agricultural South was unnecessarily destroyed by the nasty industrial North is just something I going to have to live with.
Posted by: Bobby Farouk at May 26, 2005 03:02 PMNo argument from this quarter, Bobby. We might disagree if there's ever a movement to start ripping down monuments from courthouse squares, but so far as I'm aware it hasn't come to that.
Incidentally, what's your opinion on the current Georgia state flag?
Posted by: Ben Brumfield at May 26, 2005 03:07 PMThe Georgia flag raises a good point about the issue, which makes the matter so sticky. The Georgia flag resembles the national flag of the Confederacy, right? But most of us think of the battle flag, the stars and bars. Have I got my flags straight?
The Georgia flag also has thirteen stars, which represents the original colonies. There were eleven states in the Confederacy. Yes?
I would think most people looking at the Georgia flag wouldn't see a problem, although it does allude to the Confederacy.
I'm so confused.
Posted by: Bobby Farouk at May 26, 2005 03:39 PMThe Georgia flag also has thirteen stars, which represents the original colonies. There were eleven states in the Confederacy. Yes?
In addition to the 11 fully-fledged CSA states, secessionist representatives from Kentucky and Missouri created state governments-in-exile which were recognized by the Richmond regime.
Posted by: Alan Allport at May 26, 2005 03:48 PMSo what do those thirteen stars in the Georgia flag represent?
Posted by: Bobby Farouk at May 26, 2005 04:01 PMIn which context, I'm intrigued by a recent television ad for KFC fried chicken restaurants. It shows a series of five-pointed white stars flowing between white lines on a red field while the background music repeats the opening riff of "Sweet Home Alabama." Those introductory bars -- the four-note pickup plus two full measures in 4/4 time -- are instrumental only, without any singing, but some people will recognize them as fitting lyrics that can be read as supporting a past segregationist governor. It's hard to tell if viewers are expected to recognize the symbols and music as allusions to a debatable kind of Southern chauvinism or if a simpler evocation of Southernness is intended. Maybe it's the same kind of ambiguity as the practice of playing "My Old Kentucky Home" at the Derby without singing the words?
Posted by: Martha Bridegam at May 26, 2005 05:19 PMSo what do those thirteen stars in the Georgia flag represent?
From the website Ben mentioned:
"The coat of arms and wording 'IN GOD WE TRUST' shall be encircled by 13 white five-pointed stars, representing Georgia and the 12 other original states that formed the United States of America."
I guess it's just fortuitous (depending on your point of view) that they can also be said to represent the 13 CSA states.
Posted by: Alan Allport at May 26, 2005 05:25 PMThe Georgia flag resembles the national flag of the Confederacy, right? But most of us think of the battle flag, the stars and bars. Have I got my flags straight?
Almost. The Georgia flag resembles the national flag of the Confederacy. The national flag was called the Stars and Bars. Most of us think of the battle flag, which was not called the Stars and Bars.
The problem with the names is that the now-obscure flag that represented the Confederacy in its first years had the catchy name. The now-ubiquitous flag that was only an army/regimental standard in 1861/2 never really had a good name. I mean, "The Battle Flag of the Army of Northern Virginia" just doesn't exactly trip off the tongue, does it?
Posted by: Ben Brumfield at May 26, 2005 07:27 PMI would think most people looking at the Georgia flag wouldn't see a problem, although it does allude to the Confederacy. I'm so confused.
You're not the only one. When they announced the new flag design, a Georgian friend of mine who also probably did projects in elementary school gluing felt together to form the Third National Flag sent me a link. We were both absolutely shocked they'd picked it — this seemed even more Confederate than the 1954 flag! Then I read the public reaction: flag critics were satisfied, and 1954 flag supporters (who had been arguing about heritage all along and who you'd think would know their flags) were livid.
It's a funny old world, but I guess they ended up with the best result.
Posted by: Ben Brumfield at May 26, 2005 07:33 PMstate governments-in-exile
Sara's umpteen-great uncle was president of the Missouri secession convention, so I've read up on this a bit. I actually think that Missouri had some claim to have seceded, given the chain of events surrounding the occupation of Jefferson. This led to some real oddness — one of the goals of Price's 1864 raid on the state was to conduct elections for the government-in-exile.
Early this year we spent some time in Marshall, Texas. The proprietors of our B&B pointed proudly to the parking lot across the street from them, announcing it the site of the "Former Capitol of the State of Missouri"
Posted by: Ben Brumfield at May 26, 2005 07:39 PMMartha, I haven't seen the ads, but I'm absolutely certain that KFC would do nothing at all to imperil their African-American market. I remember seeing a documentary on the wildly successful cartoon Colonel Sanders that talked about the fine line KFC walked, using the Colonel's patriarchal southern imagery to appeal to African Americans.
Posted by: Ben Brumfield at May 26, 2005 07:47 PMThis isn't the first time a KFC ad has made me itch but, yes, I was surprised too because I thought they had worked hard to avoid the appearance of racism.
BTW in the previous post I didn't mean to say the lyrics were "fitting" in the sense of appropriate, only that if you're familiar with the song, you know what lyrics go with those chords.
Posted by: Martha Bridegam at May 26, 2005 08:14 PMDo the chords include the backup vocalists' "oooh, oooh, oooh"? That's the only thing I can think of that distinguishes that stanza from the rest.
Posted by: Ben Brumfield at May 27, 2005 06:49 AMNo, nothing to do with that particular verse but the verse is still part of the whole.
Posted by: Martha Bridegam at May 27, 2005 10:19 AM
