It IS hate, not heritage. symbology of the "confederate" flag, chapter whatever

The BBQ Pit
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The purpose of these posts is to correct your historically inaccurate statement that the battle flag essentially disappeared between the Civil War and the Civil Rights era. You brought it up, in an effort (I suppose) to prove that the flag could only be associated with slavery or resistance to Civil Rights. Do not pretend that we raised the issue to distract you from some righteous crusade you imagine yourself to be conducting.

The fact is, the flag did not disappear from the scene after the Civil War. We’ve given you over half a dozen examples. (1893 Mississippi state flag, 1926 Alabama Rose Bowl fans, Dixie Motor Oil logo, Dixie Crystals logo, use of the flag by World War II units, Bugs Bunny cartoon pre-dating Civil Rights era) But it seems that no matter how many examples we provide, you are determined to downplay them, ignore them, or, bizarrely, claim that they somehow disprove that the flag was around.

After a quick Google search, here are more post-Civil-War-pre-Civil-Rights-era examples:

Display of flag in 1939 to commemorate J.E.B. Stuart.

Dixie Cola sign.

Flag on display in photo from 1935.

Confederate flag that’s been on a building in West Virginia since 1897.

A postcard from 1912. (Back of postcard.)

Old postcard with flag and legend “Greetings from Dixieland”.

Another old postcard.

Old linen postcard from Alabama.

Seeing a pattern here? Travelers were sending back postcards with Confederate flags on them, to signify that they had been to Dixie. (As in Dixie Crystals. As in Dixie Oil. As in Dixie Cola.)

Again, we’re not saying that anti-integrationists didn’t seize on the flag as a symbol of resistance in the 1950s. They did.

But to say that the flag can only be a symbol of racism is just historically wrong.

Has the flag today been so tainted by its association with racism that it ought not be flown? Yeah. And that’s why very few people these days display the thing. But if someone does display it, it is not safe to assume they have racist intent.

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This seems to be the thread that will not die. What kind of monster have I created?

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Okay, once again I’ll break my promise. As to “What kind of monster have I created?” I’d say one that refuses to accept any point of view other than its own, in spite of multiple examples refuting that point of view.

And that’s it for me. Really. I promise.

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I’m disappointed. Instead of responding to my substantive questions (Post No. 247), you just came in with a conclusory claim of refutation. You’re really no different from Great Dave.

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Louis, I know you’re done with this thread, so maybe someone else can answer this for you-

What is a legitimate, non-racist use of that flag?

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Covering up one’s naughty bits.

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Oh for pity’s sake.

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As a symbol of “Dixie,” or the South. (Dixie Crystals, Dixie Cola, Dixie Oil, postcards)

As a symbol of rebelliousness. (Animal House)

Some mixture of the two. (Dukes of Hazzard, Lynyrd Skynyrd and other Southern rockers.)

In a historical context. (Museums and commemorative events.)

As a symbol of Southern valor in war. (The Haunted Tank, World War II units.)

None of those are racist uses.

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Would you say that these are all legitimate uses today? I suppose there are companies who still use it- in the IMHO thread, someone mentions a BBQ sauce from SC that uses it- but I doubt that a national brand would use it.

Is there a difference between symbolizing the South vs the Confederacy? (is there an antebellum symbol for the South?)

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Of course they’re legitimate. Unless you are defining that word in a way I don’t understand.

Now someone using the flag in one of these ways might be considered insensitive, or even rude. But that doesn’t mean the uses aren’t legitimate.

And further, there is a difference between insensitivity, even to the point of rudeness, and racism.

Yes, actually, there is. When you see the flag in a historical display at Stone Mountain, or at a military park, or being used by the Sons of Confederate Veterans, I’d say it is being used to symolize the Confederacy.

In most other instances (at a Lynyrd Skynyrd show, on a bumper sticker, on a t-shirt, on a marketing logo) it is being used as a generic symbol of the South.

No, not really. Except for maybe the Bonnie Blue Flag, and that was really only an antebellum symbol for West Florida (parts of Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama), and arguably, Texas (to the extent it inspired the Lone Star).

And there’s the problem. If somebody wants a shorthand symbol that says “I’m from the South, how 'bout you?” there’s really nothing else out there.

See, most Southerners are using the flag (or have in the past used the flag, since few do today) in exactly the way that Texans use the Texas flag. You see a Texas flag on a t-shirt or a bumper sticker, you think, “Hey, this person’s from Texas.” And if you’re from Texas, too, you might walk up to them and strike up a conversation about the Cowboys, or Austin, or UT, or some other shared cultural touchstone. You’ve got a common bond.

For most folks, that’s all the Confederate flag was meant to do (at least in t-shirt and bumper sticker form) - strike a note of pride and announce the bearer’s cultural identity. Unfortunately, the flag comes with all the baggage of the Civil War, and all the added baggage of having been used as a symbol of defiance during the Civil Rights era. So the message gets muddled.

And since most people are aware that the flag these days sends, at best, a muddled message (regardless of actual intent), hardly anybody displays it. Nobody wants to be mistaken for a racist.

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I don’t think that that is what is always intended by the raising of that flag – especially by certain historical groups. But I think they are aware that that is how it is going to be interpreted by Africian-Americans and they do it anyway. Their Confederate heritage becomes more important to them than the feelings of a lot of other people – bloth Black and white. As I said, it’s tacky to do that when they know it is insensitive.

Historical reenactments.

I know this is difficult to believe, Great Dave, but the South has actually begun to export commodities beyond our borders. Look for products that say “vittles” (“victuals” in some parts) and “critters” and variations of BBQ and associated products.

Tennessee products are distinguished by the ingredient “flattened fauna.” We are allowed by law to eat roadkill here and some wish to introduce our cultural heritage to others. It will taste slightly familiar to Philadelphians.

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Wow. Is that trolling, or what? :slight_smile:

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About my grandfather who was a Confederate soldier:

He was underaged but wanted to join his older brothers. His father didn’t own any slaves, but he had leased some – I don’t know how many or for how long, but the farm was small. Still…

Sometime after the Battle of Stones River, he was sent back home. When he became of age, he was on his way back to his brothers when he was captured and sent to Camp Douglas in Chicago where he and 18,000 other Confederates were tortured. (Part of the University of Chicago stands there now.) (No one seemed to have a monopoly on torture.)

But to think that that part of his life was all that there was to him and therefore judge him for it is shallow and limited. He had just reached what we consider full adulthood by the end of the war and he lived to be almost eighty. At some point in his life he said that it was right that the South lost.

My father refused to join the Sons of the Confederacy and he refused to allow me to accept the discount on the housing available at that time to descendants of Confederate veterans at Peabody (now Vanderbilt). I have never joined the Daughters of the Confederecy and I really don’t hear much about that organization anymore.

In 1976 my father put a stone at my grandfather’s grave. Besides his name, it says “Veteran of the Civil War.” No mention of being a Confederate.

I never knew my grandfather, but when he was sixty-two, he sired a son who became a compassionate and generous champion of those in need of any color.

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An aside to the flag debate: To me it’s an “unexplained mystery” greater than the pyramids how the millions of men who fought in that war on both sides went back home and for the most part resumed farming/their jobs and raised their families and lived law abiding lives. We are all here arguing about the possibility of being offended, and these men went through absolute hell: starvation, exposure, sleep deprivation (may sound minor but try going a few months with about 3 hours per night when you’re lucky), the diseases and literal blood and guts they would see for days on end, even things you don’t think about like the smell of a battlefield* or the sound of thousands of guns being fired** or being away from home with no idea how your family is doing*** and then of course the carnage and disease (typhoid, measles, dysentery, STDs [when they were fatal], etc.) and having to steal to eat or having to take the shoes and ammo off of stiff dead bodies for your own use, etc… Then it was over- peace, let’s all go home, nice serving with you… once acclimated to that existence it’s almost as hard to imagine reacclimating to farming and family. It’s amazing so few of them turned out like Jesse James or other famous murderers.

I can only assume that much of it had to do with the fact millions of others had gone through it as well, thus there was an enormous support group (albeit long before notions of support groups were widespread). Unlike Vietnam, for instance, where a veteran could come home and go to his church or high school reunion and see all the men he was boys with and yet he’s the only one who was ever in Vietnam, if these men saw their boyhood friends they were almost certain NOT be the the only veteran. In the south especially**** it would be more usual to see boyhood friends and even brothers and all male relatives who were between late teens and middle age during the war and ALL of you had served, and often in the same unit (since regiments and especially companies were far more likely then to be taken from the same small area [county, city, etc.].

Anyway, to quote Henry in LION IN WINTER, “I’ll fancy it’s a mystery”.

*Gettysburg, for instance, was in July and there were thousands of dead humans and horses lying in the sun [some of the horse skeletons were still on the field when Lincoln gave the address])

**Ever heard a cannon or even an Enfield fired in person? Your ears ring for minutes and they heard this millions of times during the war. Severe hearing loss was very widespread among veterans.

***Sherman, for example, learned from a Confederate newspaper that his infant son Charles, who he had never seen, had been dead for 3 weeks, and he learned it at Christmas time, while many rebel soldiers knew there had been major combat in the area of their home and had heard nothing from their families (cut railroads and communication lines stopped anything like mail in many regions).

****Because of the smaller population and the hardcore conscription acts, there was a far higher percentage of southern men who served in the war (about 75% of the men of fighting age from some accounts- the others having some excuse or other for exemption) than of northern men (about 35% served), which is another reason the Civil War was far more remembered down hyeah.
Also important to remember is how many blacks served with the Confederacy- not as soldiers [though at least a few did unofficially] but many thousands provided labor with the armies as everything from gentleman officer’s valets to gravediggers and horse trainers and carpenters and most of all hard manual labor. These people also returned to peacetime after seeing constant carnage, and probably had something like unspoken communion with the whites who had served.

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PS- I love the google ads for Confederate flag merchandise on this.

Speaking of brotherhood among vets (regardless of what side they were on- remember the images of German and Allied vets of D-Day hugging on the 50th anniversary?), for those who haven’t seen it the footage of the 75th Anniversary of Gettysburg is touching.

Mostly silent footage

Vets of both sides greeting each other (for a very old man one still does a good rebel yell)

montage of interesting pics of old veterans to a dreadfully cheesy version of JOHNNY REB. The battle flag is ubiquitous at the reunions [including one dated 1911] so there must have been a Dixie Sugar convention going on at the same place.

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Sampiro, the first time I noticed you was because of a post you made about standing up against somebody who had made a racial slur. Or at least that’s the way I remember it. Seems to me it might have been at a play rehersal or something similar.

Just thought you might like to know that.

I can’t even remember how I found the SDMB or how I chose my user name, but I remember that post.

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I had three direct ancestors who fought in the war. One was disabled by a bullet taken at Gaines Mill. (It tore through his elbow and rendered his right arm useless, and the man attached to it angry and bitter.) Another was killed while wading through the blood and viscera of two armies in the cornfield at Antietam. The third, a cavalryman with the Georgia 6th, made it through the war unscathed.

I find the history of the war interesting. Hard not to, when you grow up as I did, surrounded by its battlefields. The Army of the Tennessee marched across the farm where I was raised, chasing the rear guard of Hood’s Confederates. It was always easy for me as a child to call up a vision of the two armies surging across our cow pastures.

Even so, I have never been big on Confederate “heritage.” I know my ancestors too well to venerate them. Of the two who survived the war, one was known to have become a Klansman (my father found his robes while rummaging through an attic as a child), and it wouldn’t surprise me if the other had been a nightrider as well, knowing what I do about his racial views. The ancestor who was killed at Antietam was no more admirable. He fathered a child out of wedlock just before leaving – my great-grandmother, who was a toddler by the time Sherman’s troops came through Georgia and took her family’s animals and food stores.

I don’t get any stirrings in my heart for the Confederacy. It was an ignoble cause, and a waste of life on a terrible scale. The South suffered deeply for generations because of that idiotic war.

I will confess, though, to finding the Confederate flag attractive as an emblem. For me as a kid in the 70s it was always just a generic symbol of regional pride – not pride in the Confederacy, but in the rich shared culture of the South. Yet I readily acknowledge that in that role it is a deeply flawed symbol, stained as it is by its association with slavery and with segregation. And its flaws as a symbol of the South are compounded by the fact that it excludes a large segment of the population who have contributed so much to the culture.

That’s a shame, too, because there really is no other symbol for the South. Besides, if you can look at it dispassionately and judge the flag strictly on aesthetics, you have to admit that it’s a beautiful design.

But as I’ve said upthread, no one with any manners would fly the thing today, knowing the offense it gives.

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I think it’s pretty much a given that these days, it’s going to be politically-incorrect and offend a lot of people, free speech or not. I mean, we have free speech, but screaming out “nigger” isn’t going to win you friends unless you’re in a room full of racists. Likewise, in polite company the rebel flag is a non-starter.

On a deeper level, the flag doesn’t bother me because pretty much EVERY flag represents a nation that is built on a mountain of skulls. The Union Jack, for instance, stands for centuries upon centuries upon centuries of absolutely ruthless imperialism, conquest, rape, destruction, outright international predation. It doesn’t bother me to see that flag because there is more to Britain’s history than atrocities - there are also regular people represented by that flag, people just like you and me. Hell, the Indians were massacred under the banner of the American flag. Who among all the nations of the world, was the only one to drop nuclear bombs on another country? Compared to some of the atrocities committed under flags that we see every day without a second thought, slavery was a blip on the radar.

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No need to diminish its horror by comparing it with other atrocities. Suffering is an individual burden anyway. Nothing can make our system of slavery seem like “a blip on the radar.” Its consequences are without end.

I agree with so much of what you said.