ABSTRACT

‘“HERITAGE’ NOT HATE”: THE CONFEDERATE FLAG AS AN ‘ICONIC IDENTITY TEXT’ WITHIN A NARRATIVE OF RACIAL HEALING

by Sharon A. Watts

This paper investigates the Confederate flag as an iconic symbol situated within the realm of visual rhetoric as identity politics. Following a resolution by the NAACP calling for the removal of Confederate flag insignia from political sites, national attention fell upon southern states as a variety of American publics argued the meaning of the flag in order to determine its appropriate context. This paper will examine the signifying practices surrounding the Confederate flag in the North as well as the South as its signification was reduced to either hatred (for those who opposed its racial connotations) or “heritage” (for those who supported its associations with a rebellious Confederate mentality and rural southern life). Within a media constructed narrative that focused on the flag’s racial connotations, the white working-class population largely in support of the flag as southern “heritage” were reduced to redneck types, both racist and working-class. ‘“Heritage’ Not Hate”:

The Confederate Flag as an ‘Iconic Identity Text’

Within A Narrative of Racial Healing

A Thesis

submitted to the faculty

of Miami University in partial fulfillment of

the requirements for the degree of

Master of Arts

Department of English

by

Sharon A. Watts

Miami University

Oxford, Ohio

2006

Advisor Dr. Cynthia Lewiecki-Wilson

Reader Dr. John Tassoni

Reader Dr. Michele Simmons

Table of Contents

Illustration Credits …………………………………………………………. iii

Introduction ………………………………………………………………… 1

I. Invisibility as Ideology …………………………………………………. 7

1. Southern Soil and the “Nature” of Things …………………….. 9 2. The White Patriarch ……………………………………………. 13 3. The White Patriarch …………………………………………… 19 4. Reconstructing Southern Memory …………………………….. 22

II. The Confederate Flag as the Iconic Symbol of the Redneck……………. 28

1. A Symbol of Silence …………………………………………… 29 2. An Icon That Moves …………………………………………… 33 3. An Iconic Symbol ……………………………………………… 36 4. The Iconic Symbol and the Redneck..…………………………. 40

III. The Lack ……………………………………………………………….. 48

1. S.C.’s Struggle ………………………………………………… 49 2. The Dark Man and the Falling Dome …………………………. 53 3. The Compromise …………………………………………….... 59 4. Shame …………………………………………………………. 62 5/6. Two Cadets …………………………………………………… 66 7. The Lack ……………………………………………………… 71

IV. Conclusion ……………………………………………………………… 74

Appendix 77 Works Cited 80

ii Illustration Credits

1. Image 1 S.C.’s Struggle. Courtesy of The State newspaper, Columbia, SC. Reprinted by permission of Al Anderson.

2. Image 2 The Dark Man and the Falling Dome. Courtesy of The State newspaper, Columbia, SC. Reprinted by permission of Al Anderson.

3. Image 3 The Compromise. Courtesy of The State newspaper, Columbia, SC. Reprinted by permission of Al Anderson.

4. Image 4 Shame. Courtesy of The State newspaper, Columbia, SC. Reprinted by permission of Al Anderson.

5. Image 5 Two Cadets. Courtesy of Accuweather/AP Photos. Reprinted by permission of Harold Salier.

6. Image 6 Two Cadets. Courtesy of Accuweather/AP Photos. Reprinted by permission of Harold Salier.

7. Image 7 The Lack. Courtesy of The State newspaper, Columbia, SC. Reprinted by permission of Al Anderson.

iii Introduction

In the 1990s, a controversy now commonly referred to as the “Confederate flag debate” erupted in the southern part of the United States. As former members of the Confederacy during the Civil War, both Alabama and South Carolina flew the Confederate flag from atop their domes, while Georgia and Mississippi had Confederate flag designs embedded in their state flags. The NAACP, upset at the states’ willingness to display the Confederate flag that they connected to racist Klan activities, passed a resolution in 1987 that called for the removal of the flag from “official use” (Coski 236). The media spectacle that ensued played out similarly among all four states with African- American civil rights groups, business leaders, and progressive politicians largely in favor of removing the flag, and largely Conservative pro-flag politicians and the white majority determined to keep the flag flying. Although the trend of divisiveness was captured extensively in the media both inside and outside of the South with non-southern states weighing in as well, the debate was depicted most extensively in South Carolina, the first state to secede from the Union in 1861 and the last state to lower the Confederate flag from atop its dome in 2000. As a cultural moment that involved over a decade’s worth of disputing and argumentation, the Confederate flag debate affords a wealth of material for rhetorical scholarship, especially within the field of visual rhetoric. In the introduction to Defining Visual Rhetorics, Marguerite Helmers and Charles Hill address the ongoing discussion to determine the placement of the visual within rhetorical studies. While the pervasiveness of the visual is difficult to deny, for we are constantly bombarded with images that are constructed in the media as well as the visual manifestations of the ideas that compose thought, there is a textual/verbal bias that tries to relegate the visual to the status of “other,” the secondary rhetoric. Such “othering” is the result of traditional rhetorical studies grounded in classical notions that emphasize rhetoric as the language and speech acts that drive argumentation. When Burke coined his definition of rhetoric as “the use of language as a symbolic means of inducing cooperation in beings that by nature respond to symbols,” he was speaking primarily about the verbal (43). However, such a definition emphasizes the power of the symbolic as well, for while mankind has constructed signs that can be ordered for the purpose of speech acts, it has also constructed symbols, visual metaphors that stand-in for the abstract ideals that construct civilization (Arnheim 137). Although 1 the symbols most clearly interrogated for their rhetorical effect are the signs of conventional language, the visual invites viewers to mentally order the imagery they perceive. In turn, this ordering is done subjectively as individuals perceive the world based upon their own subject positions that are always defined in relation to others, that is, as they are induced to cooperate with each other in order to perpetuate shared cultures. In the “Confederate flag debate,” this inducement to cooperate largely manifested itself in the divisions that existed among flag opponents and supporters. Debates over the flag’s signification, verbal arguments aligned with more classical notions of rhetoric, were acted out in the political forum, in the classroom, in the workplace, in social settings, and in homes. It was impossible to escape the pervasiveness of the Confederate flag’s presence as a driving rhetorical force in the 1990s or the reality that those in favor of leaving the flag flying and those who wished to see it come down largely failed to find grounds of mutual understanding. Throughout the debate, the media was given the authoritative position to report the “facts” that were being “learned” from each dispute that played out in the public forum as a variety of publics were forced to align and re- align themselves with the flag’s signification. As the force in charge of framing meanings, the media was largely responsible for the perceptions individuals inside and outside of the state had about the flag. An example of such framing can be found in Nancy Miller’s discussion of the iconic photograph of Kim Phuc, the Napalm Girl. In her discussion of the photograph’s placement within a narrative of cultural healing, Miller outlines how the image of one individual became a cultural icon as a variety of publics identified with the girl’s pain and used this understanding to construct meaning out of the atrocities of the Vietnam War. The photograph that captures the image of a naked girl running down the streets of Vietnam after she was burned in a Napalm attack was circulated and re-circulated during the war as “the girl” became an individual in which to identify, “Kim.” News stories reported on her healing process while the media elites who controlled the iconic photograph used the original image of her horror to supplement the stories. Ultimately, the image of the Napalm Girl was given meaning through signifying practices that associated her picture with a variety of cultural moments. As Hariman and Lucaites write, when an image such as the Napalm Girl becomes part of national life, “the public seems to see itself…in terms of a particular conception of civic identity” (36). Although the photograph freezes the image of young girl fleeing a Napalm attack, the circulation of

2 the photograph within a variety of contexts creates a structure in which to convey a media constructed narrative of national healing. The image invites viewers to partake in the privileged moment in which the photograph was taken and to situate themselves in the narrative that arises from it. While Miller’s discussion of the Napalm Girl is grounded by a photograph with a constant image, an indexical sign that provides visual proof of the horror felt by a human being, there is no one photograph capturing the Confederate flag debate that is privileged over others. During the debate a vast array of photographs were taken to capture the relevance of the cultural moment, some that were re-circulated and others that were not. Some of these images feature the flag itself, some show the individuals discussing its signification, and others base their meaning upon the absence of the flag. As is discussed in chapter three, the image to commemorate the decision to move the flag in South Carolina’s capital based newspaper, The State, was a drawing of the State House dome without the presence of the Confederate flag. The only constant in the Confederate flag debate was the point of dispute—the flag itself. The difficulty, of course, is that as a floating signifier this “constant” is inherently unstable, for its materiality provides a tactile manifestation of the abstract ideals that function within society, but these relations are always changing as individuals negotiate their relationships with each other and the symbolic. Put simply, because a symbol is essentially a metaphor with diverse meanings, the signifying practices that surround a debate to understand it will only naturalize some meanings behind the symbol while de-emphasizing others. The perception of what the image means will always vary as individuals align themselves with it differently. Thus, understanding the placement of the Confederate flag within the field of visual rhetoric involves interrogating how the symbol means by questioning the signification processes that surround it. It can never have one meaning as long as it functions as a metaphor. While a photograph depicting an individual such as Kim Phuc differs from a photograph showing a symbol such as the Confederate flag, the signifying practices that come to imbue both with meaning are similar. Much like the image of Kim Phuc that is controlled by media elites who re-circulate the image when they feel that the image fits into a current cultural moment, the media depicting the flag debate had the power to determine what information made it into the newspapers and what was left out. It was responsible for framing the debate as a narrative of racial healing by emphasizing how the initial divisions between black and white individuals during the debate were

3 reconciled with a compromise to move the flag from atop the State House dome to the Confederate monument—even as a dissident white southern majority continued to proclaim that the flag signified “‘heritage’ not hate” as the flag was lowered. With an emphasis on the racial connotations inherent in the Confederate flag, Schramm-Pate and Carlson propose a pedagogy that facilitates discussions over the flag’s signification in the classroom by addressing it as an “iconic identity text” where whiteness is projected onto and derived from the flag’s signification. While they concede that any type of pedagogy that addresses the visual cannot offer an “‘undistorted’ or unified truth about the Confederate flag,” they advocate addressing the Confederate flag as a floating signifier, “an icon around which an essential southern heritage is stitched together, through which ‘whiteness’ is performed and deployed” (225). Although they correctly recognize the relevance of a study that would interrogate the verbal arguments driven by the visual in the classroom (for the Confederate flag has made its appearance in classrooms time and again as white students have been reprimanded for wearing Confederate flag themed clothing), they take for granted that southern “heritage” is a performance of “whiteness.” Such an assumption is built upon the notion that what the the Confederate flag denotes first and foremost, is race. While they concede other considerations such as the fact that the southern “heritage” the flag connotes is traditionally very male oriented and thus connected to notions of gender, and that the flag is also associated with the lifestyle of the redneck (which I argue is very much grounded in class), the adoption of one particular way of viewing the flag reveals the difficulties of discussing signification within the realm of the visual. As Barthes says in his discussion of the image, visuals are composed of a variety of connotators (ideas) that compete for precedence as they try to denote the image. At any moment, certain connotators can stand out more than others based upon the perceptions of the subjects viewing the image, but because these subject positions are always varied, the image can never mean one thing (“Rhetoric of the Image” 42-51). Thus, to investigate the flag’s signification in terms of those who identify with it based upon notions of whiteness, is to take one connotation as a given and to undermine the nature of the symbolic as that which is constructed by competing connotators that correspond with the competing ideals that exist within society. Drawing from Schramm-Pate and Carlson’s advice to view the Confederate flag as an “iconic identity text” where individuals inscribe their identities within the realm of

4 the symbolic, and Nancy Miller’s investigation into the signifying practices surrounding the narrative of the Napalm girl, I will situate the Confederate flag within the cultural moment of the Confederate flag debate to inquire into the signifying practices that surround it, the competing identity constructs it perpetuates, and the difficulty of effective argumentation, especially when such arguments are driven by the visual. My investigation is guided by an understanding of ideology as the cultural force that shapes the way individuals perceive both themselves and the symbols they use to unconventionally “write” their identities. In order to understand the competing identities that ultimately divided a variety of publics in two, Confederate flag supporters and Confederate flag opponents, I will investigate the ideals of the Civil War South the flag came to signify in battle. The notion of ideals that a symbol can metaphorically convey begs a closer look at these ideals that are determined by the ideology that sustains a culture. These ideals, in turn, constantly evolve as the symbols that convey them float through a variety of contexts as icons to be negotiated as individuals choose to associate and disassociate themselves with them. To guide my investigation of the Confederate flag’s placement within visual rhetoric, I plan to focus on the construction of class as an identity process that upheld the ideals inherent in Civil War South ideology, and investigate how signifying practices surrounding the Confederate flag have failed to complicate notions of class that are the remnants of this ideology. The inclination to talk about race when speaking about the flag is the result of signifying practices that have stressed race as the flag’s dominant connotator. Truly, the Civil War South defined itself as a white supremacist patriarchy, a culture governed by the ideal that whiteness and maleness were the means to power in southern society. However, the notion of shared power on the part of all white men was the result of class mystification. Although all white men operated under the idea that white was superior to black, the idea was a construct of a reified South that hid the real class relationships between individuals as well as the similarities shared between white men and black men. Though class has been less fully articulated than race in the South, these ideals that perpetuated class mystification still exist within its cultural consciousness. As signifying practices continue to frame the flag in terms of the most memorable part of the Antebellum South, its construction of race, those who adhere to

5 the flag, namely the majority white working-class population of the South often become, too simplistically, racists. In “Redneck and Hillbilly Discourse in the Writing Classroom,” Jennifer Beech discusses the process in which language acts construct representations of rednecks and poor whites as racists while allowing middle-class and elite whites to ignore their own racism. In response, she invites a curriculum of deconstructive pedagogies to allow more complex images of poor and working-class whites and reconstructive pedagogies to provide students with the rhetorical tools necessary to transform these representations (173-174). As the Confederate flag debate became a polarized contest that pitted African-Americans and middle-class whites against the majority white working class determined to view the Confederate flag’s signification as something other than racism, the racist sins of the South became largely displaced upon the white working class. A deconstructive pedagogy, such as the one Beech advocates, not only allows a framework in which to investigate why the racist connotators of the flag have become aligned with the white working class, but it invites an interrogation into the nature of the signifying practices that perpetuate seemingly never-ending arguments over the Conferderate flag’s signification. Of course, the aim of such a study is not to ultimately say that the Confederate flag means class instead of race, but to demonstrate how the construction of one facilitates the construction of the other. Similarly, in line with a Civil War South that constructed identity based upon whiteness as masculinity, and masculinity as power, my study will focus primarily on constructions of race and class.

6 Chapter 1

Invisibility as Ideology:

Understanding Identity Construction within the Civil War South

An inquiry into the Confederate flag’s placement within the field of visual rhetoric must begin with an investigation into what historians have determined about the Civil War South that the flag came to signify in battle. A consideration must include its defining characteristics that separated it from the North, the relationships among its inhabitants, and (most importantly) ideology or the perceived relationships among individuals working together to sustain a unique, southern way of life. Such an inquiry must constantly be guided by an awareness of false consciousness for, as Richard Weaver asserted in 1964, the American South has an excessive sense of its essence, or status, the primary component of a culture that gives it a sense of itself (30-34). As with any society that appears to have a highly developed sense of its identity, this assurance should be interrogated as self-assured cultural identities are often the result of highly reified societies. The Confederate flag, in turn, should be studied as a visual, material manifestation of southern culture both lived and perceived. Those who choose to glorify or vilify the flag do so in response to ideals sprung from southern ideology, the ideas the flag signified during the Civil War and after. During the Civil War, the northern and southern parts of the United States defined themselves as two distinct regions, yet their interests were not so beyond reconciliation that they were unable to find mutual battlegrounds. Though the northern Union referred to the war as the “The Civil War” or the “War of the Rebellion” to emphasize the South’s treachery against the Union by seceding from the United States, and the southern Confederacy referred to it as “The War Between the States” to emphasize the struggle over states’ rights as the true meaning behind the conflict, both regions fought the same war in reality if not by name. The North fought under the American flag of the victor, a victorious living body politic, a victorious economic region, and a victorious arbiter whose success ended slavery and led to the 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments. The South, on the other hand, fought under a variety of Confederate battle flag designs with separate regiments often carrying different colors before all ranks agreed to fight under the Confederate flag design, the “rebel” battle flag often disputed in modern times.

7 In A Rhetoric of Motives, Kenneth Burke discusses war as the ultimate example of his concept of identification. He calls war, a “disease of cooperation” where rhetoric becomes a force that moves individuals to perceive their similarities as well as their differences with the ultimate motive to transform their separate and mutual states (22). For Burke, war is not separate from peace, but a perversion of it, while warfare is a dialectical process in which opposing entities unite on a battlefield to create themselves anew. They must identify with each other, that is, they must perceive the parts of their cultures that coincide, for a mutual point of combat to exist. Thus, an understanding of the Confederate flag and the South it has come to signify must be more complicated than looking at simple binaries between North and South, and should be guided by an interrogation into the complex system of identifications that distinguished the regions. The Confederate flag is not simply the “other” American flag, just as the South is not the opposite of the North, though it is often remembered as the secondary region of the United States. To the contrary, the reconciliation between the North and South following the Civil War implies points where the two regions recognized their similarities where one could be moved to reconcile with the other. Remembering the Civil War South in order to comprehend current ideals connoted by the Confederate flag involves understanding the points of contention between America’s two regions during the Civil War. In addition, an understanding of a South differentiated from the North implies an inquiry into the identification processes that happened within the borders of the Civil War South as individuals negotiated their relationships through the gender, race, and class differences that comprised the bigger economic, political, and social relationships within the culture. Such an investigation involves understanding rhetoric in Burkean terms as “the use of language as a symbolic means of inducing cooperation in beings that by nature respond to symbols” (43). Cooperation, in turn, occurs when people identify with each other, when they see similarities and differences to be negotiated as individuals and cultures evolve. In the discussion that follows, I will situate the Confederate flag’s signification within the confines of rhetoric as an identification process to question the ideology of the Civil War South and how its construction has facilitated disputes over its most contentious symbol. I will draw largely upon recent popular scholarship on the Civil War that focuses on history as memory making to investigate southern ideology and its inattention to class relationships. For example, David Blight’s Race and Reunion (2001)

8 discusses how the North and South, intent on reconciliation following the war, chose to remember it by constructing a narrative of mutual valor on the part of both the Union and the Confederacy and ignoring the race issues that remained after the war in the post war South. Because of this neglect, the healing process between the North and South occurred more rapidly than America’s other “historical inevitability,” racial justice (3). I contend that Blight’s implication is correct. It is inevitable that history must make room for a variety of narratives as the points of dispute among competing identities create new ways of remembering the past, as we learn to rethink the various ways ideology constructs reality. In the South, this reality was defined by the ideal that whiteness and masculinity were the means to power, a notion that upheld the region’s economic interest in slavery. In real time, however, the actual working relationships among individuals were hidden behind class mystification. The Confederate flag is the symbolic manifestation of this mystification as the white working class in the South continues to cling to promises of Civil War South ideology as they cling to the flag.

Southern Soil and the “Nature” of Things

In The Burden of Southern History, C. Vann Woodward discusses the distinctiveness of a southern identity that is fading in modern times, one where “the one- horse farmer, one-crop agriculture, one-party politics, the sharecropper, the poll tax, the white primary, the Jim Crow Car, [and] the lynching bee” have disappeared as the South is becoming more like its industrial northern counterpart (5). A little less of a southern sentimentalist than Woodward, James C. Cobb takes the idea of southern identity even farther by claiming that the South has always been both “of itself” and not “of another,” so that ultimately the United States is in essence the North, while the South is both distinctly southern and simultaneously that thing that is separate from the northernized image of America (3). What goes undisputed in a very contentious field of study, however, is that despite the commonality of nationhood in the Antebellum period of the country, the North and South defined themselves as two distinct regions with different means to economic sustenance. In turn, conflicting mentalities arose out of each region’s separate system of material relations. As the “other” region in the United States, the South developed what southerners and outsiders alike identified as a distinctive southern mentality, one so distinctive in fact that the most popular book documenting the historic

9 American South, W.J. Cash’s The Mind of the South, focuses on the psychology1 of the entire southern region, as though it were a unified, glorious pathology. As a culture, the South had a strong sense of myth in its antebellum years preceding the war, that is, it had a firm grasp of its “great symbolic structures which [held] together the imaginations of a people and provide[d] bases of harmonious thought and action”2 (Weaver 34). Southern society based itself on the sincere belief in the inevitable “nature” of things: man’s “natural” dominance over woman, the white race’s “natural” superiority over all other races, southern ancestry as “naturally” superior to northern ancestry,3 and an agrarian lifestyle as “naturally” superior to an industrialized one. To question the natural order of things was to question God’s preordained law that made some individuals superior to others and carved out a space for every participant in southern society. In Masters of Small Worlds, Stephanie McCurry explains how southern churches countered the Methodist church’s anti-slavery resolutions in the North by recognizing secular social distinctions in the South and imbuing them with religious meaning (142, 146). Southern ministers such as Charleston minister John B. Adger dismissed the idea of an egalitarian society on earth, and penned the “Christian Doctrine of Human Rights and Slavery,” which insisted that “An absolute equality among men…neither has existed nor does exist…nor is yet anywhere demanded by the Scriptures” (qtd. in McCurry 212). According to southern thought, there was nothing immoral about keeping all southerners in those “natural” places defined by the characteristics in which individuals could identify and form connections. Interestingly enough, the Christian Doctrine discusses equality

1 Like Cash, David Sibley stresses the usefulness in psychoanalysis to understand the “us” versus “them” mentality created by regional fragmentation. This fragmentation leads to unconscious stereotyped images of places and others, much like the traditional stereotyped images of the North and South during the Antebellum South, the Civil War, Reconstruction and, to a lesser extent, in modern times (Geographies of Exclusion 116-128). 2 Weaver posits that there are two components to any culture: status and function. “Status,” or the nature and quality of a culture’s essence, springs directly from the myths of the culture, while “function” is a means to change and advancement. For Weaver, the South was defined by its status and deteriorated because of its lack of function. The North on the other hand, did not have the status, or a fully developed essence, but its function gave it the means to advancement over the South. Weaver asserts that the status of the South paired with the function of the North would create a rich culture if the 2 regions could combine attributes. 3 Southerners believed that following the English Civil War, the aristocratic Cavaliers had settled in the American South while the Puritan Roundheads settled the North. Thus, they bought into they myth that they were biologically superior. Cash would later attack this myth and point out that though there were Cavaliers in Virginia, southerners were not generally descendants of Cavaliers, nor did they “spring up to be aristocrats in a day” (5). See The Mind of the South (5), Plain Folk of the South Revisited (187), Away Down South (43-44). 10 among “men,” perhaps in reference to mankind in general, but the statement itself implies a lack of equality that undermines any interpretation of “men” to include women. Similarly, the equality among men that is discussed in the doctrine makes the primary distinction between white men and black men as slaves as if to ignore the differences among white men, or among black men. Skin color was the visible manifestation of God’s law that difference belongs in different spaces. The South differed from the North in that the South boasted an egalitarian society comprised of acknowledged unequal subjects and asserted that such a society was mandated by God. In the center of this civilization defined by God’s unquestionable “natures” in southern society, was the reliance on southern soil, the defining characteristic of a place that utilized the “natural” fertility of the land and a hospitable climate, the fundamental aspects that first separated the North from the South. As history has turned to favor the race narrative of the Civil War—the account of the South that discusses its distinctiveness as a white supremacist, slaveholding society—it has downplayed its predecessor, the narrative of an agrarian society, such as the one captured in 1930’s I’ll Take My Stand. In this seminal text, twelve southern scholars upset at the South’s acceptance of the North’s industrial ideal asserted that “the whole way in which we [Southerners] live, act, think, and feel, [is] rooted in the agrarian way of life of the older South” (qtd. in Woodward 8). In 1941, a decade after I’ll Take My Stand, W.J. Cash wrote that the southerner who was developing a complex self-consciousness before the war, “[t]his simple, rustic figure,” was the center of southern society, “the frame about which the conditions of the plantation threw up the whole structure of the southern mind” (31). Thus, the notion of individuals from rural areas of the South created a southern mentality that was first and foremost grounded in southern soil. Woodward debates the shift from the celebration of a southern agrarian tradition to a southern racist mentality with Professor Ulrich B. Phillips who defined the central theme of southern history as something other than the “ephemeral economic order” that the agrarian lifestyle made possible. For Phillips, what defined the South as distinctly southern was the common resolve that it should remain a country of white men (10). While both narratives of southern history are embedded in truths pertaining to the southern mentality that defined a region, one fails to completely reconcile the other. The celebration of southern agrarianism pardons the South of a racist system that used a rhetoric of whiteness to disempower black slaves. On the other hand, the emphasis on

11 the South’s division between black and white does little to complicate notions of an agrarian South defined against an industrialized North, or to question the divisions that existed in the South between large slaveholding whites and white yeoman farmers4 and poor whites, a group I will refer to simply as the common whites.5 If the southern climate and land made it “natural” for the region to find its strength in agriculture, the southern soil did not necessarily give rise to a system that privileged whiteness over blackness. Those who succeeded economically in an agrarian system, however, would necessarily be empowered over those who did not; thus the white men who became the large slaveholders and cotton producers in the South would become the ruling class, a group I will simply refer to as the planters. What the racial and agrarian narratives both have in common is the notion of property. Whether the emphasis is on ownership of farmland to produce economic sustenance in the form of rice, tobacco, cotton, etc., or the ownership of slaves, power in the South was based upon claims to the southern land and the human property that would cultivate it. As Don Mitchell says in his 1996 study of migrant workers in California, “[C]ontrol over the production of space—the ability to create space in particular ways— also lends to powerful groups the ability to actively create race” (qtd. in Hoelscher 659, emphasis in original). As a region that defined itself vehemently against the North through its usage of myth, the South created a space where maleness and whiteness were endowed with “natural” ownership rights, while class distinctions were deemphasized to uphold the power of the planters.6

4 Cash defined “yeoman farmers” as the non-slaveholding whites who owned farmland that was poor for cultivating cotton, but fertile for other purposes (22). They are among the “common whites” or “plain folk” of the Antebellum South. 5 There are many names used to refer to the majority white population of the South that was outside the planter class: ‘cracker,’ ‘plain folk,’ ‘clayeaters,’ ‘sandlapper,’ etc. I use ‘common white’ generally to refer to those individuals outside the planter class who bought into the culture of the South and, with it, its dominant ideology, but whose material access was limited in comparison to the powerful planter classes. 6 Defining the “ruling class” in southern society is difficult since many accounts of the ruling class included all slaveowners, even farmers who owned few slaves. In actuality, slave ownership did not guarantee a vast estate, the right to make political decisions, or the right to admittance in ruling class culture. Cash guessed that the number of “proper aristocrats” in Virginia, South Carolina, and Louisiana, in the 1860s would probably come to less than 500, a number significantly less than Professor Dodd’s guess of 4,000- 5,000. Despite the difficulties in pinpointing an exact numerical figure, the fact that a small planter class possessed the majority of southern wealth in the Antebellum South is largely uncontested. 12 The White Patriarch

The South that history records celebrated the “natural” superiority of an agrarian society that was ruled by God and that functioned based upon a familial model. As Ayers says, the South that advertises itself as more earthy, more family oriented and more spiritual is affronted when it is called “hick, phony, and superstitious” by outsiders. He continues, “The South feeds the sense of difference and then resents the consequences of difference” (What Caused the Civil War? 43). Thus, the aspects of the South that distinguished it from the North are also the ones that gave rise to the ideological system the Confederate flag symbolizes. Southern society functioned (and thus perpetuated itself) by establishing a white patriarchal system that relied on the land for economic livelihood. Fertile soil gave rise to an agricultural lifestyle and regional prosperity that flourished in the years preceding the Civil War.7 Like southerners, northerners recognized the economic gains that could be derived from the South’s advantageous farming climate and encouraged their fellow Americans to focus on the cultivation of cotton in which their soil, climate, and the “nature of their population,” were all well adapted (Cobb 19, emphasis mine). Out of this economic system arose a notion of the family unit that functioned to keep the system running, with all family members in his/her respective heavenly ordained place. As the individual in charge of keeping the family unit running and the fields producing crops, every white man was the head of his household. In turn, the individuals in charge of producing the South’s cash crop, cotton, were the heads of southern society. These white men, the planters, owned the majority of the South’s slave population and the majority of the cotton fields. While there seems to be little contestation that the white men of the South were as “King” as cotton (for the culture that celebrated its certainty of its self also expressed certainty that white men should dominate it), the complex relationships among individuals in the Antebellum South cannot be adequately understood through drawings that place all white men on the top of an imagined hierarchical pyramid representing the South. The mere notion of a “white patriarchy” implies a societal construct that privileges race (white) and gender (patriarchy) while mystifying class. The white

7 Cobb points out that the favorable southern climate contrasted with the New England and Middle colonies that would be forced to use a more diversified approach to farming. While the South would be a fertile ground for crop production that would rely on producing as much of a crop as possible (and implementing slave labor as much as possible to yield a higher turnout), the North’s lack of fertility would lead to industrial ingenuity, a system that would lead to the region’s economic advancement over the South (9,19). 13 patriarchy upheld the South’s economic order and the power that accompanied it through an ideological system that stressed identifications based upon race and gender while leaving the economic differences among white men largely unaddressed. A sense of their shared whiteness unified white men in thought, in their perception of southern reality. The real material relationships among southern whites contradicted the ideal of white supremacy, for white women were not allowed property rights, and the majority of white men were not large landowners who owned vast plantations run by black slaves.8 Thus, through a rhetoric of race, the planters upheld their economic system (the South’s system), while leaving the class differences present in society largely unarticulated. Cash asserts that the masses of poor whites in the South often identified themselves with planters based upon a growing awareness of their shared whiteness and a desire to align themselves with those in power. In reality, there was a great economic divide that separated wealthy planters from poor whites, those who considered themselves part of a Cavalier aristocracy, and those who were looked down upon by outsiders as “[c]rackers”9 (3, 74-78). Fifty years later in The Mind of the South Revisited, Shelton Reed reevaluated Cash’s stance on class consciousness in the South. He concluded that though Cash was a bit overzealous in saying that there was an almost “complete disappearance of economic and social focus on the part of the masses,” he was correct to assert that there was nowhere near as much class consciousness as there should have been (149). White men operated within the illusion that they were equal shareholders in the southern economy, aware that the ultimate disempowerment involved blackness, for there was no room for class ambiguity for the black slaves who were not allowed property rights. It should be of little surprise then that the myth of the Old South, such as the one immortalized in Gone with the Wind, is dominated by images of the white empowered rich and their happily subservient black slaves. The caricatures divide along raced and gendered lines, with white gentlemen sipping juleps and white

8 As Cash points out, it is difficult to find the precise census information to determine how numerous the South’s ruling class was in the years preceding the Civil War. Census reports often classify slaveholders as any white man who owned a slave. Research on the early South points out however, that small slaveholding farms were not considered part of the ruling class, and that a man could own a slave and still be considered a yeoman farmer of a lower class than the southern aristocracy of large slaveholding whites. 9 Cash further explains that much of the shared identification among whites was based upon familial connections. Whites, who through industry and ingenuity had become part of the rich ruling class, may be related by blood to their poorer white counterparts who operated within the illusion that the success of their relatives could also happen to them. Grady Mcwhiney also claims that the “real Cavalier,” or the actual white man of the southern aristocracy was very much like the ‘cracker’ in that they shared a common culture. Though their economic conditions were different, they shared the same values (such as the privileging of whiteness and maleness)(189-190). 14 women fanning themselves, while black slaves are content to do the actual work that seems like a labor of love. All the others, such as unhappy slaves or poor whites are simply invisible in the myth of the Old South. As John B. Boles points out in the foreword of The Plain Folk of the Old South Revisited, we know more about the slaves and the elite planter class of the Old South than we know about the majority population group, what Boles refers to as the South’s “plain folk,”10 or common whites—those whose identifications are grounded primarily in class. Southern identity was defined so that the majority group of the Old South, the one most identifiable by notions of class, has become the one that is the most difficult to distinguish (Hyde X). Myths of the Old South that stress the presence of wealthy, leisurely white men who head families composed of genteel southern belles and loyal slaves reassured the South of its prosperity as a region separate from the North. The race narrative of the Civil War exposes the falsehood of such a myth as history looks to the margins to break through ideology and interrogate the subject positions of slaves. Boles’ “plain folk,” however, are not clearly marginalized like the slaves are in the myth of the Old South, nor do they fit into the myth. As whites, they should be empowered according to southern ideals, yet they are outside the real domain of economic power. In myths of the Old South, the presence of common whites is an anomaly to a fiction. This fiction is largely the result of what Lacy K. Ford describes as the southern manifestation of a ‘Herrenvolk’ democracy, or a white egalitarian society that ignores class differences among whites while celebrating the equality promised those by virtue of their skin color. In her essay of the Old South’s Plain folk, she discusses the idea of white equality as the explanatory concept of the Old South that replaced the concept of southern paternalism, the idea that all men of the South were promised equal shares in southern society by virtue of their manhood. According to McCurry, whether one was a member of the aristocracy or a yeoman farmer, by virtue of his maleness, he was a master of a Christian household built upon an agrarian lifestyle (226). Once again the emphasis is on a culture tied to the land, guided by religion, and based upon the family model.

10 Boles defines “plain folk” based upon Owsley’s definition in his original lecture series entitled “Plain Folk of the Sold South” and notes the complexities involved with defining these individuals. According to Owsley, the plain folk were small slaveholding yeoman farmers. For historians since Owsley however, the “plain folk” have been non-slaveholding whites. Despite the slipperiness of defining how many slaves one owned (or didn’t own) in order to be considered among the “plain folk,” what is clear is that these “folk” went largely undefined because of an inattention to class distinctions among whites. 15 While historians have differed over whether to privilege the paternal model or a ‘Herrenvolk’ one in describing southern ideology, when taken together, these two concepts coincide with historical accounts of a white supremacist society where men were the decision makers. The ideology of the Antebellum South was based upon the idea that all white men were heads of their households and masters of their property, whether that property was the land itself, or the wife, children, and slaves that the white, male head of the family owned. With such a system in place, all white men believed they were patriarchs, rulers of the South. Of course, the paternal, white egalitarian model of the South is no new concept, nor is the idea of ownership in the hands of the ruling class. What history has downplayed, however, is how the mystification of class divisions among white men upheld the South’s ideological framework. An example of this framework can be found in a letter that Beaufort Baptist planter Winborn Lawton wrote to his son in a seeming spirit of Christian goodwill. He writes, “Thank God my Family all Black and White are well,” (qtd. in McCurry 178). Within this statement we find: the acknowledgement of white male ownership (“my” Family), the recognition of a gendered and raced body (“Family” implies the recognition of his diverse subjects—a wife who is white and female, children who are white, male and female, and black slaves who are both male and female), and the acceptance of a system that eradicated class distinctions by the equal juxtaposition of black and white, egalitarian in a way that mystifies their “natural” places (Black and White). In the letter, “black” and “white” are equal in that they both define the “natural” differences that God makes possible (for Lawton thanks God for all the identities he recognizes within his household). Yet within the South the emphasis on racial distinctions eradicated informed understandings of class consciousness and the separations that did exist among those supposedly in power—white men. The unequal distribution of resources pervaded the Antebellum South. For instance, by the mid-eighteenth century in South Carolina, the top ten percent of large slaveholders owned more than half the state’s wealth (McCurry 33). In the rare instance when a white man from the yeoman class, a common white man, worked his way into profit, he was often viewed with disdain as a “Cotton Snob,” the Old South’s version of “new money” who was somehow less of a gentleman since his wealth was newly acquired and he had not had time to fully acculturate himself to the South’s cabal of

16 gentlemen11 (Cobb 48). Despite a common region, gender, and race, white men did not inhabit equal spheres in the Antebellum South, yet these men rallied together because of a vested interest in the property that southern ideology posited was due to all white men. A society run by god’s “natural” heads of the family (white men) promised an infallible southern identity that would define all the South’s subjects. Southern ideals in the Antebellum South were American ideals, the most fundamental among them being the Constitutional belief in “life, liberty, and property.” Whiteness entitled property rights to all its men, and even the smallest non-slaveholding farmers took pride in being able to provide for their families by producing enough food to sustain them, and (if they were extremely lucky) to turn enough profit to obtain more property. In the years preceding the Civil War, many small farmers were producing just enough crop to feed their own, and they sustained their families by overseeing the entire family unit, wife, children, and (in some cases) a few slaves, as everyone worked side by side in the fields (Bond 73-99, McCurry 79, 84). The “nature” of the property owned, however, differed among white men based upon class distinctions. Despite the richness of southern lands which were conducive to growing cotton, the majority of southern farmers, the yeomen, did not have access to these lands and resorted to growing other crops (tobacco, rice, corn, etc.) that left them a less profitable, hand to mouth existence. The black belt region of the South, that is, the more familiar setting of the Old South myth where cotton was abundant and fields of slaves were vast, was largely unavailable to smaller farmers. Not only did they have little access to the South’s most fertile region in the lowcountry, but prospects outside the black belt were often dashed by the expansionist planter class that settled the most fertile regions outside of the Deep South a few steps ahead of their yeoman counterparts. These small farmers were pushed farther and farther back onto the most undesirable land of the red hills, sandlands, pine barrens, and swamps, trapped on unfertile land, and locked into a system where economic advancement and admission into planter society meant the acquisition of wealth producing property (Cash 21-28, McCurry 71, Cobb 52).

11 According to McCurry, unlike their husbands, the women of the aristocracy had the privilege of being able to show their disdain to the common whites. Thus, during social events when common whites were invited to celebrate at the houses of the planters, the planters were cordial to them while their wives refused to associate with their “sorts,” a phenomenon that McCurry attributes to a sense of class consciousness. Interestingly, although the common whites were allowed to partake of the social festivities, they often were not allowed to sit on the “elevated platforms” as their planter counterparts did (270-271). 17 Similarly, the security of property rights was ensured by a southern political system that favored the wealthy planter class. Frequent property disputes over the ownership of unenclosed land which pitted yeoman farmers against planters often resulted with the planters emerging victorious (McCurry 20-21). That unenclosed land would often be rewarded to planters instead of small farmers in these disputes is not hard to understand when one considers the political make-up of the South. Kathleen Brown provides the example of yeoman exploitation at the hands of a powerful planter class in her discussion of the Berkeley government in colonial Virginia. One of the many reforms passed by Berkeley’s Long Assembly allowed the planter class to: sell tobacco for twice the rate allowed smaller farmers, to tax the masses for the hefty expenses incurred during the Long Assembly sessions each year, and to limit the voting class to those who were both landowners and housekeepers. Thus, many freemen found themselves paying high taxes to support the extravagant lifestyles of the planter politicians in office, but were denied the right to vote them out (156). The debate over who should have the right to vote was often based upon property holdings which allowed large landowners to have more of a say in government. That these differences did in fact exist make the notion of an egalitarian, white patriarchy seem ludicrous, yet southern culture rested upon the functioning of a false consciousness that gave the region and its acknowledged citizens a sense of self, even if this existence was built upon perverse identifications that (paradoxically) rested upon their “naturalness.” These identifications and the larger southern self it created established the points of contention that separated southerners from each other and the South from the North. Despite the illusion of a ‘Herrenvolk’ democracy though, economic differences divided white men in reality if not in ideology. This discrepancy remains in the cultural consciousness of the United States and the South especially as the economic differences among men in the Civil War South have become a sidebar to a major racial narrative of southern history and the Civil War. The planter class in charge was white, male, wealthy, and thus entitled to the most property and power. With all the real differences between planters and farmers in terms of power, how could an ideological system function that relied on notions of every white man’s right as a patriarch and ruler of society?

18 The White Patriarch

In the Antebellum South, every “real man” could acquire whatever his neighbor could. He could earn it through hard, manly labor. To deny this fact of the South would be to admit that one was not a man, in essence, that he was not white. The rhetoric of the South emphasized the juxtaposition of whiteness and maleness as a means to power so much so, that to mention other real factors (such as class differences) would crush the system and make one seem less male and less white, two traits that were conflated in order to reinforce the South’s distribution of resources and power. It is no coincidence that following the war black men sought property, the ownership rights that would allow them access to the concept of masculinity as it was defined in the Antebellum South. For instance, in his book, The South: A Tour of Its Battlefields and Ruined Cities, John T. Trowbridge documented the sentiment of former male slaves when he recorded what one slave thought his rights should be. When asked what he desired as a free man, the ex- slave responded simply, “land”12 (qtd. in Cobb 36). Thus, to promise former male slaves the now mythic notion of “40 acres and a mule” was to acknowledge their new role as black men instead of property. That freed slaves never came to realize this promise fits very well within the concept of a southern society that had every reason to prevent black males from becoming thought of as real men, lest it would have to redefine its cultural sense of self completely. The idea of black male slaves as property instead of men helped counter any notions of shared maleness among those outside the planter class that could undermine the ideal of a society ruled by a white patriarchy. As the heads of society who controlled the means of production, the South’s planter class constructed the South’s dominant ideology, the way the region understood itself as separate from the North, and the way all individuals understood their places within the culture. White male planters governed a white supremacist society built upon the idea that all white men had equal claims to power. The emphasis on the similarities among white men counteracted identifications that could have united based upon class relationships or the similarities among women, slaves, and poor whites that did not possess the resources that determined one’s access to

12 Blight documents the meeting between Sherman and Secretary of War Edwin Stanton and twenty black ministers following the Civil War. Faced with questions of how to handle the newly freed slaves, a southern black minister by the name of Garrison Frazier answered, “The way we can best take care of ourselves…is to have land…we want to be placed on land until we are able to buy it and make it our own” (24-25). 19 power. Such identifications would not only upset the power of the planter class, but the ideals of a white patriarchy that sustained the southern culture all southerners relied upon to define their existence. Although the dominant ideology and the corresponding identifications that uphold it arise naturally to ensure the perpetuation of a culture (to borrow from Althusser, the planters were not necessarily “tyrants and despots” consciously colluding against everyone else), there were moments within the Antebellum South when planters made strides to separate white men from black men. Whether or not these actions were conscious or unconscious, they moved common whites, white servants, and poor whites to align themselves with the planters based upon race. In her discussion of Bacon’s Rebellion, Brown addresses the dissatisfaction felt by the masses of poor whites led by Nathaniel Bacon over Governor Berkeley’s failure to protect their property from Indian attacks, and the Governor’s policy that allowed his favorites to profit from illicit trading with Indians while preventing others from doing so. By using a rhetoric that slandered the honor of Bacon and his supporters, Berkeley polarized a white planter government from the disgruntled masses who rebelled against it. The last Baconians to surrender were a group of black slaves and white servants, a unified body that reminded the planter class that the two groups saw each other as allies for the purposes of running away or rebelling (179). Both groups came together as men who had an interest in property rights and ownership, the fundamental coin of southern society that ensured the power of the planters. Despite laws that prohibited “illicit traffick[ing] with negroes,” many white men crossed the property boundaries set by their planter class counterparts and engaged in commerce with the slaves. Not only did these actions dishonor the planter’s claim to property, but it challenged the very ideological system that defined it, for to engage in commerce with a black man is to impart ownership rights, and thus to recognize him as something other than property, to recognize him as a man. While Bacon’s Rebellion occurred in 1676, two centuries before the Civil War, it exemplifies a key concept—that men did acknowledge identifications based upon some sense of class consciousness and the recognition that there existed within the margins of society a threat to society’s power structures and its power class. As early as the late 1690s, laws were enacted to subdue the connections among individuals with vested interests that could subvert the culture. Specifically, all white men, regardless of economic holdings, were given rights and privileges that clearly separated them from

20 black men. In colonial Virginia, for example, black men were prohibited from carrying guns or any other weapons—devices that white men viewed as a means to manhood in that they allowed one to protect his property.13 In 1692, white servants were allowed to amass property while black slaves were required to turn over any livestock they acquired to their masters (Brown 181, 183). Ownership rights were distributed among white men to ensure their claim to masculinity and to actively recognize their exclusive entitlement to maleness. Ultimately, black male slaves were to be clearly recognized as recipients of shame and bondage while white male servants were promised future status as voters, citizens, and patriarchs in an attempt to sever the identifications between black and white men who shared economic interests that could disrupt the interests of the planters (Brown 183, 185, McCurry 153). A unified body of black and white men could pose a real threat, as was demonstrated during Bacon’s Rebellion. To deny the black man the status of manhood by stripping him of property rights and to go so far as to define him as the property of white men was to identify the real need on the part of all white men to feel empowered, a feeling that class mystification perpetuated. Even more powerful than the actual laws that helped planters conciliate with common whites is the South’s usage of myth to maintain a racist society where black individuals could be defined as dehumanized subjects. The threat of black masculinity (as a competitive force in an economic society, as a male who could copulate with white women) is often used to discuss the South’s fear of miscegenation, tainting the white southern bloodline with something outside what is allowable in the South’s cultural sphere of “natures” that kept everyone in separate places. A black man defined as property (not-human) emasculated him so that white men (regardless of economic disparities) could unite based upon their claims to the power of the phallus, the symbolic manifestation of maleness and white supremacy. At the same time, the black male’s appearance of personhood (a human-being) made him something more than capital; it made him a part of the family owned by white men. In myths of the Old South the black male is captured in the caricature of Uncle Tom, an emasculated, happy, carefree slave who loves his compassionate Master and looks to him for protection and provisions as a child would.

13 In 1705, the Virginia assembly rewarded freed white servants with muskets and 50 acres of land as a way to reinforce the differences between black slaves and white servants, an action that also symbolically deprived black men of the power of the phallus (Brown 183). 21 Joel Chandler Harris’s character, Uncle Remus, is one of the most popular examples of the South’s idealized Uncle Tom. As an ex-slave, Uncle Remus remains loyal to the South and its agrarian ways and continues to serve his master’s family. In one of the most significant Uncle Remus works, “Uncle Remus as a Rebel,” Uncle Remus shoots a Union soldier during the war to defend his master’s Georgia plantation. As a postwar narrative during the era of reconciliation, Remus saves the Confederate family and helps nurse the Union soldier back to health. After all are saved, he freely gives of his labor to both sides (Blight 227-229, Cobb 79). While the story addresses the black man’s role in unifying the North and the South after the Civil War, Uncle Remus’s position is still confined within the southern ideal that places him within a comfortable sphere outside the rights of white men. Although he is no longer property, he has no desire to acquire it, and thus never infringes upon the space of real propertied men. Such Old South myths of the Antebellum era reveal the complex ideals that kept the Civil War South functioning with a firm grasp of its identity as an agrarian and white supremacist society, a space where planters created race by defining whiteness in terms of maleness, and maleness in terms of power. Thus, black male slaves were removed from power discourses (for they were not real “men” because they were not white), as were black and white women (for discourses of whiteness upheld the notion of a patriarchy, a sphere separate from the one inhabited by females). With such ideals in place, there was little room for class consciousness as southerners based their lives upon the belief in the perfection of such a system. Following its defeat in 1865 the South was left to answer for the perverse identifications that upheld its ideology as former “Uncle Toms” became black men who competed with white men for jobs, and as poor whites became the abnormality of the Antebellum South’s promises of white supremacy.

Reconstructing Southern Memory

Historians contend that Reconstruction of the South failed because the North did not fully recognize the southern claim to its distinctive identity, one that existed within its cultural consciousness even after defeat. Scholarship such as Blight’s discusses the Reconstruction era in the United States as a time of mythmaking to reconcile northern and southern differences. In the spirit of reconciliation, both sides chose to remember and celebrate the manly valor of all soldiers, blue and gray. That is, both sides found a

22 point of remembrance where they could come together for the sake of turning two separate regions into one nation again. However, the shared identifications between North and South based upon military bravery failed to address the differences among southerners, the differences that gave rise to a southern culture distinctive from a northern one. The North ignored a crucial underlying difference that separated it from the South— the South was able to define human beings as subjects other than human in order to perpetuate its agricultural system. Such a critical difference in belief could not be glossed over in the spirit of goodwill without consequence, without Blight’s “historical inevitability” of racial justice as the ideological threads of the Antebellum South began to unwind. The spirit of reconciliation following the Civil War ignored the South’s difficulty in defining subjecthood for newly freed slaves. That both sides tended to push questions of race aside attests to the difficulty of reconciliation when opposing sides adhere to such fundamentally different warrants. The eradication of slavery meant that the white patriarchal system and its notions of agrarian property had to be redefined completely, for blacks were no longer economic holdings but human beings. Black males became men who competed with white men for jobs and whose competitive force drove many whites off the soil that had given rise to the southern agrarian lifestyle. Edward Ayers discusses the initial trend following the war for white men to move out of rural areas as the South’s economy declined. The wealthier planters who were forced to move out of the South to maintain their economic standing often held onto their land, the dirt that reminded them of fertile southern soil and the promise of an infallible Antebellum South (The Promise of the New South 64). Their sons often achieved success in the cities with a little financial help that would give them a start in the new, industrialized America (97). Common whites migrated to factory towns as low wages pushed them away from the plantations still largely cultivated by former slaves (62, 113, 114). Regardless of economic status, all white men had to contend with the incongruity of believing in the ideals of white supremacy (every white man’s claim to power) even as white men were losing jobs to black men willing to work for lower wages. White supremacy, in turn, no longer upheld the same South that defined humans as property and self-reliance as living off the land. Perhaps the most horrifying manifestation of the South’s need to cling to (and thus remember) white supremacist ideals is the act of lynching and castration enacted

23 upon newly freed black male slaves during Reconstruction. In “The Anatomy of Lynching,” Robyn Weigman explains lynching as the physical manifestation of the symbolic move to emasculate black men no longer defined as property. She discusses how lynching, the beating of the black male body, was often followed by an act of castration, a moment where the white mob “aggressively denies the patriarchal sign and symbol of the masculine, interrupting the privilege of the phallus and thereby reclaiming…the black male’s (masculine) potentiality for citizenship” (83). No longer a non-sexual Uncle Tom owned by a white “father,” the black man became sexualized, capable of fathering his own children and resembling the white male heads of households that ruled in the white patriarchal South. Thus, castration was the violent enactment of white male anxiety that black men who were becoming more like them would share in or usurp their claims to power. Weigman continues by asserting that castration was an act of feminization where white males attempted to align black men with the individuals who were still disenfranchised after the war, women (83). The North and South that swapped manly stories of military bravery both clearly privileged masculine claims to real power.14 In the South especially, its myths focused on southern belles on pedestals, an idea that defined white women outside the power discourses of the plantation while still allowing them to share in the status and honor of the Old South. This “other” space inhabited by women not only protected white male claims to power, but it unified white men as they tried to maintain this space, to protect the unique position of southern women from the black male. During Reconstruction, this protection was symbolically acted out in the act of castration, as white men denied the sexuality of the newly freed male slave, the “black beast” who could copulate with white women. Black masculinity following the Civil War, as captured in such key texts as Richard Wright’s Native Son and Ralph Ellison’s

14 In the vein of the Antebellum South’s ideology that equated power with masculinity, the celebration of the southern soldier’s valor and superior fighting skills is one of the most popular southern myths sprung from Civil War history. Outnumbered by Union soldiers and cut off from a steady stream of supplies, rag tag Confederate soldiers defiantly waving the “rebel” flag somehow managed to “whip” the North battle after battle. To quote Robert E. Lee’s farewell to his troops, the South had submitted only because they were “overwhelmed by superior numbers and resources.” Former Union colonel William Brooke-Rawl expressed the South’s sentiment to perceive itself as more masculine than the North when he wrote, “[W]e begin to distrust the memory of those days, and almost to question the general belief that the battle of Gettysburg was a victory for the Union arms.” He charges that the production of southern memory had escalated to the point where many Union veterans wondered if they had even been present at Gettysburg (Blight 138, 167). 24 Invisible Man, would be perceived as hyper-masculine, highly sexualized, and beastlike. Perhaps not so coincidentally, the protagonists in both texts are forced to interact with a white woman; Wright’s Bigger accidentally smothers the text’s white heroine, Mary, while Ellison’s Invisible Man is forced to gaze at the nude body of a white woman at the discretion of a mob of white men who control the spectacle. Both texts demonstrate the anxiety felt by white men to define and control the new subject positions of black men. These individuals were no longer property, but what were they? Adhering to the belief in white supremacy, white southern men chose to see black men as direct threats to their economic livelihood, their women, and most importantly, to the ideals that remained of the Antebellum South that protected their claim to ownership and power. The need to define black men as something “other” than men reflects the white man’s desperate attempt to hold onto the ideal that a white patriarchy was still in power and thus, that the South still lived. While Weigman sees her discussion of lynching as a means to understanding the “interesting relations of race and gender in U.S. culture,” the act of lynching and the efforts made by white men to separate themselves from black men is motivated by class interests as well. Once again, the presence of class distinctions is less obvious in an act that destabilizes the gender of black men to deny them access to race privileges. Most clearly, just as the white and black men of Bacon’s Rebellion realized that they were in a separate space from a government ruled by planters, the common whites and newly freed black slaves found themselves occupying similar spaces in an economically crippled region and competing for the same types of work. In Wages of Whiteness, David Roediger discusses the interaction between black and white workers following the war and the intersections between class and race. Whites detested their similarities with blacks as they found themselves doing similar types of work. They insisted upon their difference, based upon race if not by class. For example, white women working for wealthier whites insisted on terms such as ‘helps’ or ‘hands’ instead of ‘servant.’ The development of the word ‘boss’ grew out of the rejection of the word ‘master’ on the part of white male workers (49). Even words such as ‘freemen,’ a term that designated white workers before the northern victory of the war, became detestable after the war, when it could also be applied to free blacks (55). In essence, southern ideology taught all whites that regardless of their working conditions, they were superior to blacks. While this idea was clear enough to reinforce when black

25 individuals were slaves, the eradication of slavery provided evidence of identities that were not “natural” at all, but social constructs. There was proof in the form of workplace competition that masculinity was not naturally exclusive to white men; there was proof in the form of poor whites viewed with disdain by northern outsiders that whiteness was not the visual manifestation of the white race’s superiority and power. Travel narratives during Reconstruction captured the conditions of southern whites following the war and expressed the bewilderment of northerners who were unable to account for the poverty and deplorable living conditions characteristic of the South’s rural, poor whites. White individuals from the North writing about the postwar South disassociated themselves from the poor white southerners they encountered. As Jamie Winders discusses in “White in All the Wrong Places: White Rural Poverty in the US Postbellum South,” the writers of these travel narratives often emphasized the excessive whiteness of poor southerners, their degenerate bodies and death-like pallid appearances, as if to create a white “other” from which they could distinguish themselves. Their existence undermined the northern perception of the South as a white supremacist society where whites were empowered and black slaves were their foil, clearly without power. For the authors of these travel narratives, there was no excuse for white individuals to live in deplorable conditions, especially when southern ideology had successfully convinced northerners and southerners alike that class differences did not exist in the South. According to Winders, the difference between blacks and poor whites during the South’s Reconstruction is that “although both groups had been held, if in very different ways, under slavery’s heel,” black individuals were viewed with pity by northern outsiders while poor whites were poor and dirty because they chose to be (53). Put simply, within a discourse that privileges whiteness as the means to power, there was no excuse for whites to be as poor as blacks. Similarly, within the South, southerners chose to ignore class distinctions or interrogate how the inattention to the economic differences among southerners before the Civil War upheld a society constructed to preserve the economic interests of the planters and the dominant ideology of the Antebellum South. Thus when Judge H.H. Cook proclaimed during a Memorial Day speech in 1901 that in 1861, southerners were “the best informed, most energetic, the most religious, and the most democratic people on earth”…that they had no class distinctions among whites and that they had successfully Christianized 4,000,000 “of this [Negro] unfortunate race,” he conveyed the power of the

26 mythic Old South. The ideals that upheld a reified Antebellum South and a white planter class before the war could live on and perpetuate themselves as more “natural” than ever in memory (Blight 283). Ultimately, however, the way we remember the Antebellum South should not be limited to discussions of white male privilege, but should involve interrogations of how various identity constructions perpetuated the culture and gave the South a clearly defined sense of self. The ideology that created this self is the inheritance of all southerners as well as those individuals outside of the South who choose to identify with it. Every subject within southern society inhabited a space that depended upon competing identifications based upon region, race, gender, and class, one where the existence of any one identification does not eradicate the existence of the other within the cultural consciousness that exists today. Through a lens of class criticism, however, the common whites, Hyde’s plain folk, have not been clearly articulated within the narrative of the South. Class mystification left these individuals at a loss to articulate why they did not fit into the narrative of white male domination following the war, or were not clearly recognized as marginalized. These individuals were undefined, exploited by their own choice to be constructed by southern ideology, and given no means to articulate the feeling of loss within the primary discourses of race before or after the Civil War. Faced with the task of speaking the unspeakable, and forcefully preserving a felt memory, many southern individuals would cling to the Confederate flag, the emblem of a defiant southern mentality. As a flag actively waving, it could signify the roles of a variety of individuals within a defeated civilization and become a visual testament that one’s perceived reality has a place within memory construction.

27 Chapter 2

The Confederate Flag as the Iconic Symbol of the Redneck

The battle flag of the Confederacy that is commonly referred to as the “rebel flag” has become one of the most contentious symbols in United States history. Debates that question its signification are as controversial as discussions about what the Civil War was really about—perhaps even more so. While historians have contested the distinctive mentality of the South in Civil War history through the linear logic that is captured in scholarly writing, the Confederate flag confounds systematic thought by falling within the realm of the symbolic and the visual. For instance, in David Blight’s introduction to Race and Reunion (2001), he immediately establishes that his work will be based on the construction of southern memory, but acknowledges that his emphasis on race in the South will prevent him from addressing other important subjects pertinent to southern remembrance. Thus, the Confederate flag is only addressed briefly. Quite the opposite, in The Confederate Battle Flag: America’s Most Embattled Emblem (2005), author John M. Coski spends the majority of his book discussing the various contexts surrounding the flag after the Civil War without attempting to dissect the southern ideological system that the Confederate flag came to signify in battle. In short, the complexities that define the Civil War South as a culture become even more complex when they are attached to a symbol such as the Confederate flag—when a multitude of competing meanings become signified by the unspoken, that which is devoid of language, the visual. The impulse to separate discussions, to talk about ideology or to talk about the contexts in which a symbol appears, reflects the inability to reconcile language with the image, a failure to write about what is unconventionally “written” in imagery. The symbolic, however, cannot be removed from the continually shifting meanings that exist above and below the symbol itself. For Arnheim, the symbolic mediates between highly abstract “disembodied forces” that hover above a corresponding realm of “practical things” (137). Thus, a Confederate flag waving over a Civil War battlefield comes to signify what has become silence, competing northern and southern ideologies that have become so disentangled and beyond the realm of rhetoric—the verbal—to reconcile that both parties enter upon a contract to exchange lives instead of words. The celebration of the flag bearer during battle, tales of soldiers who died instead of handing their regiment’s flag over to the enemy, and disputes over decisions to return

28 captured flags in the years following the Civil War, all reflect the power of the visual as a rhetorical force, that which moves individuals to adopt those identifications they perceive an image to signify, the identifications that create the ideologies upholding a cultural center.

A Symbol of Silence

In Ways of Seeing, John Berger discusses the priority and power of the visual, for we see the world before we learn to speak of it, and we always view it in relation to ourselves (7-9). Ultimately, we never see the world innocently; we are constantly negotiating our placement within it in accordance with the cultural codes that are already, and always in place. Inherent in Berger’s explanation is a connection between the visual imagery we perceive and the ideology that establishes the political, historical, and economic order within a culture. The recognition of a connection between the idea and the image, the process that defines one in terms of the other, is not new. Plato’s infamous allegory of the cave speaks of individuals whose perception of the world, their idea of the world, is incomplete because the chains that bind them to the walls of the cave only allow them to view shadows, images that become the physical proof of the world in which they exist as ideologically defined subjects. While Plato’s example illustrates key concepts inherent in the notion of false consciousness taken up by Marxist scholarship, the fact that this consciousness is impressed upon by the force of images binds the visual to ideology, the image to the idea. Arnheim’s discussion of symbolic imagery as a mediating force could perhaps be extended to the role of images in general, that which correlates the abstract world of ideas to the material world of sensory perception. That is, the practical, material relationships that give rise to a system of ideas, ideology, find a point of mediation through corresponding mental images, the subjective material manifestations of ideas that write themselves upon the consciousness. As W.J.T. Mitchell writes in Iconology: Image, Text, Ideology, images are the materials of thought and ideology depends upon ideas that provide these images, these materials (160-161). He goes so far as to define ideology— the science of ideas, as iconology—the theory of imagery. While Mitchell seems unsure if an idea is an image, or that which precedes it (for he writes of them in both ways), the

29 connection between the two is key to understanding how the visual functions within ideology. Of course, the visual image written upon the consciousness, the one that is inherently tied to the ideas that construct a culture, is not the same as the Confederate battle flag, or any other visual that defines itself not as an image in general, but explicitly as a symbol. The Confederate flag is a tactile cloth, one that can be viewed and touched; its materiality signifies the presence of an ordering of thought, a consciousness created from the remnants of images and ideas shaped by ideology. The function of the cloth as a stand-in for interacting ideals defines it as a symbol. It provides visual evidence that there is an abstract force of ideas at work that characterizes the culture and the relationships of its members. Therefore, discussions that address the Confederate flag’s meaning are inquiries into a system of belief, a system that defined southern mentality before the Civil War, in battle, during Reconstruction, and in the post-war years as the flag appeared in numerous contexts and became a floating signifier that was adopted outside of the South as well as outside of the United States. The meaning behind this floating signifier became a contested site of inquiry as the Confederate flag debate played out across the South and reached its crux in Columbia, South Carolina. Individuals composing a variety of publics emphasized the flag’s connection to military bravery, the institution of slavery, rural farmers defending their homes—a veritable grab bag of possible meanings that largely divided individuals along racial lines. The flag and all its competing meanings taken up during the debate exhibited the slipperiness surrounding “the rhetoric of the image,” the limitations of semiotics that Barthes addresses in his theory of imagery. For Barthes, the impossibility of understanding the denoted iconic image, what the flag means, is due to the denoted image’s reliance upon connotators that will always be based upon a lexicon of associations that vary from individual to individual (46-51). Put simply, as long as each individual perceiving an image is unique, the associations that define his/her subject position will alter the connotations perceived in the visual. At the same time however, individuals sharing a cultural experience will find similarities despite their differences. To borrow from Burke’s concept of identification, they will identify with the perceived similarities of experience that position them within an ideological system. In Burkean terms, the “cluster of interrelated parts” that connote the Confederate flag, reflects southern ideology, or “the structure of interrelated ideas” that maintained southern culture

30 (87). The impossibility of understanding what the flag means should be counteracted with questions of how it means, for connotations can be framed rhetorically so that certain ones have more presence15 and make the denoted image seem more stable, more naturalized than it actually is. In the Confederate flag debate, the key connotation that would be interrogated was the concept most clearly (if incompletely) defined in the Antebellum South’s agrarian society—race. Of course, the Confederate flag’s role as a racist marker is not restricted to the Antebellum South or the Civil War. Although the KKK’s first flag was the American flag, and is still flown at Klan rallies, media representation has emphasized the organization’s association with the “other” flag, the flag that signifies racism, the “rebel” flag. Much to the dismay of traditionalist southern groups such as the United Daughters of the Confederacy intent on keeping the flag within its Civil War context, the Dixiecrat16 party of the 1940s waved the flag during its rallies, creating an association between the Confederate flag and segregationist politics. The fact that the flag has become more than a simple military banner is difficult to deny, hence the tendency to handle it delicately (or ignore it altogether) in historical accounts of the Civil War South. What is generally agreed upon, however, is that the Confederate flag is the flag most recognizable as the flag of the Confederacy and, if perception is [subjective] reality, racism is identifiable as a key part of the consciousness that grew out of the South’s defeated white supremacist ideological system. The assertion that the Confederate flag means racism is problematic, however, in that it implies the naturalization of a denoted image, and ignores the rhetoricity of signification practices that stress certain connotations behind an image while suppressing others. What the Confederate flag has come to mean as a symbol is largely defined by what history cannot articulate—a cultural consciousness recorded imperfectly through memory. For instance, individuals determined to view the flag as strictly a military banner, often erroneously refer to it as the Stars and Bars, the first flag adopted by the Confederacy before what is now known as the “rebel” flag replaced it. The Union

15 Hill credits Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca for coining the term “presence” as it pertains to verbal arguments. The term refers to the highlighted points within a verbal argument. Hill extends the term to the visual where certain connotators are highlighted for rhetorical effect. 16 The Dixiecrat Party, formerly the States’ Rights Democratic Party, was formed in response to Civil Rights initiatives that separated northern Democrats from southern Democrats. No longer “Democrats,” the Dixiecrats were distinctly southern and fought to ensure segregation. South Carolina Senator Strom Thurmond was their first presidential candidate. Although Thurmond did not win the election, the Dixiecrats were a prominent political party in the South roughly from 1944-1952. 31 attitude during Reconstruction that stressed reconciliation between North and South by celebrating the valor of both sides in battle may provide clues to the mistaken naming. Much like an Antebellum South that was the “other” America, the Stars and Bars was the “other” Stars and Stripes. The first Confederate flag design resembled the American flag17 so much in fact, that Confederate soldiers mistakenly fired on each other in the early years of the Civil War. The Confederacy would go through a variety of flag designs before deciding to unify under the same banner in which General Beauregard’s troops fought, what is currently known as the Confederate flag. Before the adoption, separate regiments carried separate flags to stress the individuality of each unit.18 The current Confederate flag was adopted throughout the ranks out of military necessity to carry colors that would distinguish the two sides, and to stress a distinctly southern identity as men came together as southern soldiers instead of men fighting for their individual regions. More important than the particulars of choosing a flag design, however, is the idea that the first flag of the Confederacy, the Stars and Bars, was chosen for its “Americanness.” Whether southerners asserted that the Union should not have a monopoly on American designs, or they still recognized a shared identification with northerners who were also Americans, the Stars and Bars symbolized a connection with the Stars and Stripes during the Civil War. Reconciliationist memory that emphasizes a connection between the two regions based upon bravery in battle would allow the conflation between “Stars and Bars,” and the “other,” more strictly southern Confederate flag distinguishable by its St. Andrew’s cross design.19 While a discussion of the South’s competing official flags may seem trivial, it provides a key illustration of how a symbol can connote fragmented ideologies based upon the cultural context of perceiving audiences. During the crux of the Confederate flag debate, southerners who supported the flag’s presence atop the State House dome

17 “American” here is interchangeable with “Union.” Historical scholarship emphasizes that America is in essence the Union and the South is that which is “not the Union,” a perverse form of America. 18 For a more detailed account of the complexities surrounding choosing a Confederate symbol, see John M. Coski (2-27). 19 William Miles created the design commonly referred to today as the Confederate flag. Inspired by one of the flags flown at the South Carolina secession session, he borrowed the design of a blue upright cross on a red field with a palmetto tree and the crescent moon on either side of the cross. Miles removed the crescent and the palmetto tree from the design and made the cross diagonal to avoid religious connotations. He called the cross the “saltire of heraldry,” and meant for it to signify strength and progress. Ironically, other southerners viewed the cross as the St. Andrew’s cross that derived its name from the Christian martyr who did not believe himself worthy to be crucified on an upright cross as Christ did. The cross’s Christian connotations have become more prominent than Miles’s usage of a saltire. 32 flooded the “Editorials” section of Columbia newspaper, The State, with arguments asserting that the Confederate flag could not signify racism, because the “real” Confederate flag that symbolized the region as a body politic (and thus its racism) was the Stars and Bars; the “rebel” flag simply denoted military bravery. Quite the opposite, others charged that the Stars and Bars should replace the Confederate flag atop the State House because it was not tainted with the war blood that preserved slavery in the way the Confederate flag was. Despite the glaring conflation of the concepts of “slavery” and “racism,”20 explanations of both flags can be changed to fit whatever identification its adherents wish to ascribe to it. The confusion surrounding the two flags reflects the confusion surrounding Reconstruction as a time of reconciliation between northern and southern regions united in the mutual decision to ignore defining the South’s black subjects now that they were no longer slaves. The ideological system that characterized the Civil War South is based upon shared identifications that take precedence over each other at different points during memory construction. For instance, identifications based upon a shared sense of the white southern patriarchy that defined the Civil War South create a variety of connotations that coexist together abstractly behind the image of the Confederate flag. Thus the Confederate flag can connote southernness, whiteness, masculinity, defiance— all states of being that are individual “parts” of the cluster. At any given time, each part can possess a greater presence than the other parts from the perspective of its viewing public and can become, too simplistically, what the flag means. Of course, to accept any one connotation as the signification is to ignore the nature of ideology as structured, existing only through the interaction among many competing ideas and identifications.

An Icon That Moves

To write about a symbol is to write about a lack, to compose that which is outside the signs of the alphabet and exists at the highest level of abstraction and inarticulation. According to Charles A. Hill, all images are complicated, difficult to investigate for rhetorical effect because we process them heuristically based upon emotional responses

20 While “slavery” refers to the Antebellum South’s property system that refused all ownership rights to African slaves, “racism,” is more commonly equated with segregationist politics and discrimination following the eradication of slavery. The OED traces the term’s beginnings in 1936. A concept such as “racism” denotes second-class citizens. Slaves in the South were not allowed citizenship. 33 instead of analysis. Thus, we process images very differently from written texts. While writing is governed by rational, analytical thought, the visual triggers a fight or flight response, an inherent survival mechanism where our emotions respond immediately to the imagery we perceive (30-33). While an initial gut response to an image can be rejected after contemplation, the fact remains that images elicit more immediate responses and invite innate feelings governed by the psychological, which is always shaped within the context of symbol producing cultures. The natural impulse to respond to symbols is the recognition of reciprocity— members of a culture operate based upon a shared ideological system with parts constantly shifting as its underlying meanings compete for precedence; culturally derived symbols, in turn, come to signify those underlying meanings. The appearance of the Confederate flag can exhibit meaning intertextually, for its colors—red, white, and blue—parallel the American flag and may carry with it connotations of nationalism and freedom. The predominance of red in the Confederate flag may imply southern hardiness and valor, the characteristics that red is believed to have signified in the American flag.21 While symbols may have physical characteristics which carry connotations of their own, a symbol’s appearance is secondary to its function as a metaphor, as a stand-in for ideas. Though these ideas and their corresponding meanings are difficult to pinpoint, they are not arbitrary. To the contrary, the competing images and ideas that compose the consciousness a symbol signifies cannot exist outside of ideological contexts. To borrow from Panofsky, the intrinsic meanings of an image are “apprehended by ascertaining those underlying principles which reveal the basic attitude of a nation, a period, a class, a religious or philosophical persuasion…” (Argan 15). For Panofsky, this understanding can be reached through iconology, the investigation of an image within the various contexts in which it circulates (15-23). Historical texts that trace the contexts in which the Confederate flag appears are investigating the power of the flag as an icon. Unlike a symbol that exists as a silent metaphor in one space, an iconic symbol such as the Confederate flag moves through a variety of contexts as it is perceived by audiences that negotiate its meanings differently.

21 Though the Continental Congress left no record as to why they chose the colors for the flag that they did, they used the same colors in the State Seal in 1782. White signified purity and innocence, red signified valor and hardiness, and blue signified vigilance, perseverance, and justice. George Washington viewed the colors differently however. Red for him signified British colors. As the part of the country that identified the most with the British lifestyle, the South chose a Confederate flag design that is dominated by the presence of the color red traditionally associated with the British flag. 34 The existence of the icon as an image that moves threatens to disrupt the time/space binary separating image from text, a relationship that preoccupied everyone from Plato to Kant, philosophers and rhetoricians who feared the power of the “false image” that appeared under the guise of naturalized truth. In the 18th century, G.E. Lessing attempted to counter this guise by demonstrating that poetry, the written word, was superior to paintings, the image, because of a temporal existence that allowed text “the infinite range of our imagination and the intangibility of its images.” He tried to restrict the image to a spatial existence, since time was not “proper to its nature” (qtd. in Mitchell 104, 106). As Mitchell points out though, there would be no need to assert that the genres should not be mixed if there were not a real possibility that one could impede upon the territory of the other. The existence of the iconic symbol as a floating metaphor seems to testify to the reality of this possibility. Perhaps Lessing’s fear and the constant threat of the false image, was resistance to the possibility that the visual, that which appears outside of conventionalized, man-made language, could become rhetorical if it were thought to move through time. The image that appears as naturalized truth could easily deceive if it were allowed to move the wills of individuals. Rhetoric facilitates persuasion, which involves inducement. In turn, inducement implies movement, which occurs temporally. Likewise, the shifting connotations that exist behind an image imply movement that correlates with perceiving audiences who choose to associate and disassociate themselves with these connotations. As an icon moves through time and space, its meanings shift through a variety of contexts, forcing individuals to identify with it based upon their subject positions and the fragmented ideologies that shape the ideas behind the icon’s evolution. The iconic symbol becomes visual persuasion then, in that it induces shared identifications. As Argan asserts, the iconology of the symbol should be understood by tracing its “growth in the fecund ground of the collective unconscious” (16) Thus, understanding the Confederate flag as an iconic symbol, a specific type of image with a set function, involves an investigation into the ideologies of the Civil War South that were present during its inception, as well as the representations that continue to surround it. These representations come to imbue the flag with meanings that move audiences to identify with it in different ways. The concept of an image moving an audience, and the idea of the visual as rhetorical becomes slippery when considered within classical notions of rhetoric as

35 persuasion. In the classical sense, persuasion drives argumentation traditionally grounded in logic, language, and speech acts. As Anthony J. Blair points out, however, there must be a distinction made between visual rhetoric and visual arguments. While arguments are by definition rhetorical, visual rhetoric is not necessarily an argument. An argument implies truth syllogisms and propositions that lead to conclusions, while images influence by affecting psychological associations (43-45). What both have in common is persuasion, a force that acts upon an audience. In the case of the image as influence, it is difficult to pinpoint the rationality behind that influence because it is unclear how we are able to logically accept or reject the way the parts of an image play upon our psyche.22 If Barthes is correct, however, to assert that the naturalized denoted image is coded as such to emphasize certain connotators through signifying practices, an iconic symbol possesses proof of this signification as it reappears in a variety of contexts. As Hariman and Lucaites contend, the icon does not tell one story, but it tells the conditions of public representation (38). These conditions that arise from the contexts in which an image appears shed light on the ideas behind it, and the choice to identify with certain ideas is by definition rhetorical.

An Iconic Symbol

An investigation into how an image can construct public memory as it comes to possess meaning itself must address what is present in the image, while also noting what is absent or deemphasized. To reiterate, an understanding of the connotators present in an image, including an iconic symbol such as the Confederate flag, must begin with an inquiry into the ideals behind it, those that receive the most emphasis as well as those that are less clearly articulated but remain in the cultural consciousness. The signifying practices that frame these connotations appear in multiple contexts and must be investigated to understand how a symbol begins to mean as individuals identify with it. The Confederate flag present on Civil War battlefields would be the representative of southern identity, that which is not northern. That which is southern, in turn, would be defined by an agrarian, white supremacist society. As discussed in

22 Ann Marie Seward Barry contrasts Descartes who believed that people devote equal cognitive abilities to either the acceptance or rejection of an idea, with the more widely accepted concept created by Spinoza. According to Spinoza, to contemplate an idea is to accept it. Rejecting an idea is a much more active cognitive function. See Visual Intelligence. 36 chapter one, a ruling planter class would have the greatest access to the property that would provide economic sustenance. To protect those property rights, the planter class emphasized the shared identifications among white men, regardless of the real economic disparities that existed between the ruling class, the planters, and white yeoman farmers and poor whites. Thus, what became emphasized was whiteness and maleness as a means to power. The ideal that would become the most emphasized in the southern system, the primary fragment of the South’s ideological system that would remain in Reconstruction, was the notion that white was superior to black. It should be of no surprise then that during the Confederate flag debate, southern newspapers picked up the larger racial fragment of southern ideology and featured articles about race relations such as the story of African-American Willie Byrd and white segregationist Jimmy Byrnes who lie side by side in a Columbia cemetery. The story’s caption promises “a tale of the good and bad of South Carolina race relations” (Monk A13). In a January issue of The State, an article entitled “Columbia Ready for King Day Rally” correlates a protest march against the Confederate flag’s presence atop the South Carolina State House dome with the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday (Askins A1). Anomalies to the racial narrative, such as the story of African-American Johnny Harris who manufactures Confederate flags while wearing a t-shirt that says “You Wear Your X. I’ll Wear Mine”23 also center on sensationalistic news stories about race relations (McClam A1). Regardless of the story, the emphasis is clear—what the Confederate flag means first and foremost is race. Removed from the Confederate battlefield, the flag appears in photographs and newspaper articles that discuss the strides toward racial equality the South still needs to make. Stories about Martin Luther King Jr. that allude to the Confederate flag debate taking place in the present frame the flag as a racist marker, a symbol to be associated with segregation and the fight for Civil Rights in the 1960s. The story of an African-American man manufacturing Confederate flags and the picture that accompanies it reinforce the associations between the flag and the African-American community. An African-American man proudly manufacturing a Confederate flag implies that the flag’s connotations should be interrogated to investigate how a black man could take pride in creating a racist symbol. Ultimately, he is an oddity within a racist

23 These shirts became popular during the Confederate flag debate, as white youths across the nation identified the Confederate flag with white pride in response to Malcolm X t-shirts that connoted black pride. 37 narrative that frames the Confederate flag debate as the story of individuals coming to terms with the flag’s racial connotations as strides are made to heal the divide between black and white southerners. Northern newspapers captured the Confederate flag debate and emphasized the flag’s racial connotations as well, oftentimes picking up stories about the KKK and publishing images that featured Klansmen with Confederate flags. While many of these articles were not directly about the debate, the presence of the Confederate flag in these stories reinforces the associations between the Confederate flag and racist activities. A dismissive editorial by R. Bruce Dodd that appeared in The Chicago Tribune describes the debate as “The North vs. the South all over again,” and proclaims that “the outcome probably will be the same” (27). A commentary written by a New York Times writer appears under the headline as, “The South’s Attachment to Offensive Symbols,” while the article discusses the South’s peculiarity in that “the many people who would stomp anyone burning an American flag proudly embrace the banner of those who tried to destroy the country that the American flag represents” (Chapman 29, emphasis mine). Both pieces are key examples of a very common response in northern newspapers even during the debate in the late 1990s to label the South as “other.” Dodd’s proclamation that the debate is “North vs. South” ignores the fact that the Confederate flag controversy was most heated among southerners questioning the remnants of their region’s history. It reduces those who oppose the flag to a modern day North, and those who hold fast to it, to the South. The individuals referred to in the Tribune article as “those” trying to destroy the country the American flag represents, implies a type of southerner akin to his/her racist, rebellious ancestors. Those who embrace the Confederate flag are not enlightened Americans; they are clearly not northern. Both assume the vestiges of the myth that the racially enlightened North (America) conquered the racist South, a romantic narrative that has been constructed in hindsight but is, as modern historical scholarship attests, dangerously simplistic and outright false. The seeming paradox of a south clinging to the American flag as well as the Confederate flag—an iconic symbol that many individuals nationwide view as un- American—is not a peculiarity at all. History records a North intent on forgetting the South’s transgressions against America and even the greater willingness to pardon the region of its sins against the black race in the spirit of unity following the battle. This forgetfulness is not unlike the frequent northern response in the Confederate flag debate

38 that expresses frustration that the American flag is not enough for southerners, that they cannot simply forget the “other” flag. For flag opponents who supported the flag’s removal from the State House dome, remembering implies holding onto racial inequality, the shameful white supremacist narrative of both the South acknowledged and the United States unacknowledged. For individuals intent on keeping the flag flying who insist their detachment from any racist propaganda, forgetting implies conceding that the white supremacist narrative has been agreed upon as the official story of the Antebellum South, that the Confederate flag signifies racial hatred. This reduction is too shameful and too simplistic for many flag proponents. The collective cultural consciousness of the South demands that the ideology of the South be questioned to explain its defeat and the lives that were sacrificed to change it so that no one’s story is ignored. This consciousness has no memory except in myth and the symbolic, thus the need cling to the flag and remember those identifications that unite based upon connotations that cannot be reduced to racism alone. Understanding the Confederate flag involves dissecting the Civil War South’s system and investigating the culture, its center, and the relationships among individuals—relationships that were perceived based upon the emphasis on a white patriarchal system, as well as the actual lived experiences of southerners that often conflicted with the perceived southern ideals. As an icon that reappears in contexts that stress racist activity and race relations, its key connotation becomes Barthes’ coded denotated image, that which seems naturalized, but is in fact created within a culture through signifying practices that stress racial connotations. If the Confederate flag is as simple as a white, racist marker what is to be made of the repeated argument by the largely white southern population that it denotes “‘heritage’ not hate”? Is there a part of southern memory that exists in the cultural consciousness but has been less fully articulated through memory’s imperfect historical record? The Confederate flag, like any other symbol, carries connotators that are processed based upon the subjective identifications that suit the needs of those who view the symbol. The connotators that have less public presence are those that reflect the mystified identifications in the Antebellum South that gave rise to the battle and the flag that came to signify it, namely the less clearly defined identifications that would become swallowed up by the umbrella term “heritage” during the debate.

39 The Iconic Symbol and the Redneck

A resident from Lancaster, South Carolina, writes in the 1999 editorial section of The State: I resent being referred as a racist because I support the Confederate Battle Flag flying over the State Capitol. I have discovered that I had four great- great-great grandfathers and two great-great-grandfathers and many cousins who fought for the South during the War Between the States…I have also discovered that none of them owned slaves. One relative was killed, and on his tombstone it reads that he was killed “Defending His Country.” Honoring our Ancestors does not make us racist. (Sinclair A10) White indignation at being called racist dominated the headlines of southern newspapers during the Confederate flag debate while editorials in northern newspapers largely expressed disbelief that southerners could be so myopic as to call the Confederate flag anything other than racist. This editorial written by a native of rural South Carolina has key ideas shared by many similar ones written by southern, white flag supporters: the desire to identify with the South’s brave (manly) soldiers, the effort to disassociate oneself from a rebellion against America by emphasizing passivity and defending one’s country,24 the notion that remembrance is honoring those who gave up their lives to solve a conflict of ideologies, the emphasis on family, specifically paternal connections, and the idea that slavery was not the driving force behind the war. While it is easy to see the remnants of Antebellum South ideology in this editorial, these key ideas with all their complexities became reduced to “heritage” during the debate. Of course, what is problematic in this notion of “heritage” as the flag’s true meaning is that it fails to tackle the South’s ideological system. Regardless of whether or not this writer’s ancestors actually owned slaves, the South fought to protect the institution of slavery, that which upheld the power and property rights of the planter class. Slavery cannot be removed from the South’s economic system simply because the subject positions of African- Americans have been redefined to reveal the atrocity of the Antebellum South’s white supremacist planter society. Also, “heritage” feigns to unite all southerners and, as an

24 Also, the writer here refers to the war as “The War between the States,” a title of the war that was popularized in southern Reconstructionist literature to emphasize the southern perspective of the war. Southern literature emphasized that the South was not rebelling against America (the Union), but asserting its rights as a body of states equal to other states. What is largely ignored in this phrasing is the fact that southern identity has been largely defined against the North, as an “other” identity. 40 African-American native who defines himself as a “rural southerner from the small town of Yemasee” points out in a State editorial, the Confederate flag does not necessarily define his heritage as an African-American (Lester A8, emphasis in original). While African-Americans can feel just as southern as their white counterparts,25 many southerners both black and white felt that the term “heritage” was too vague during the debate. If “heritage” after all is the same as “southernness,” why wouldn’t all southerners adopt the southern flag? Why would a symbol divide individuals along racial lines, and why would certain southerners, namely the white working class, be the ones most likely to be associated with supporting the Confederate flag by the time it came down in July 2000? On the other hand, the charge that the flag is simply a racial signifier ignores identifications based upon a shared sense of regionalism, family, and the real economic relationships among men that were grounded in an agrarian lifestyle. Put simply, the charge that the flag only signifies racism is as essentialist as saying that it is only about “heritage.” News stories are easier to write however (and easier to sell) when arguments are reduced to binaries, and when those who try to explicate the argument become reduced to supporters or opponents. These supporters and opponents, in turn, become oversimplified types—so much so that Senior Editor of The State, Brad Warthen, wrote an article spoofing the stereotyped players in the debate as an admission that representation often falls short of critical analysis (See Appendix). Individuals begin performing their roles through polarized rhetorics, flag opponents insisting that the key signified behind the flag is race, and flag proponents asserting that the key meaning is “heritage.” Opponents and proponents get progressively louder instead of more critical as they sacrifice mutual understanding for rhetorical performance. Both sides disregard the fact that a symbol signifies fragmented ideologies composed of clusters of connotators that must interact so that the ideas that correspond with “heritage” must coexist with the ideas that correspond with racism. Perhaps the most interesting idea in this editorial celebrating grandfathers and cousins is what is glossed over and possibly missed by readers who have been taught through popular media representation to think about the debate in terms of black and white only. While the charge that none of his ancestors owned slaves may seem to be a

25 Steven Hoelscher discusses Richard Wright’s account of his southern experience in Black Boy. Though he calls the South “the terror from which I fled,” he also recognizes it as “the culture from which [he] sprang,” one that gave him both a “place” and “space” in which to define himself (657, 678). 41 feeble attempt to disassociate himself from the flag’s visible racial connotations (as seemed to be the reaction to this type of argument in many northern editorials), it also addresses the nature of class relationships in the South. This writer is saying in essence: my ancestors were not planters reaping the great economic benefits from slavery. They were not the ones who created the ideological system that supported the African slave trade, yet they still died defending the southern identity that defined their existence. They fought because they had to preserve the white southern identity that was defined for them by the ruling class, one that defined individuals by virtue of skin color. The great sin was not the fight to preserve one’s identity, but the perverse way identity was defined for black and white southerners alike. Ideology may be false consciousness, but that consciousness is the only reality one knows until (like Plato’s shackled men in the cave), individuals are loosed from their chains and given the tools to interrogate the cultural codes that have defined them. The “heritage” argument to disassociate racism from the flag’s meaning ultimately failed because it denied the largest shard of the Confederacy’s failed ideological system—white supremacy. It also ignored the power of the icon, the fact that the flag has become more than the battle flag that accompanied the rebel yell in the 1860s and has been used in association with racist organizations as well as segregationist politics. Thus, arguments to keep the flag flying such as Attorney General Charlie Condon’s plea in 1996 that the flag signifies Confederate soldiers who were “poor farmers defending their homes” ultimately failed (Frank A10). In an effort to downplay the flag’s racial connotations, flag supporters such as Condon used working-class rhetoric, drawing upon notions of class that were deemphasized in the Antebellum South to create a new, non-racist narrative of southern history. After all, the story of rag tag soldiers fighting to preserve their identities is much more heroic than the story of white planters who had a more direct economic interest in slavery. Of course, rag tag soldiers and white planters alike had an interest in slavery, for it upheld the ideas and identifications that created the larger southern culture which defined all its subjects. South Carolina historian James Dabbs asserts that the South that entered the Civil War with epic splendor later romanticized its plight when defeat became evident. He describes soldiers as “good men, caught in the trap of interest and custom and regional pride, not wise enough to find a peaceful way out” (250). After they lost the war, southerners held onto images of the success they once had of the Antebellum South, what

42 Dabbs calls “the plantation myth.” While he notes that poorer, small farmers did not completely buy into the plantation myth (for they never had the economic prosperity linked to plantations), they bought into the aspect of “old clan virtues” that celebrated an independent spirit, and spent much time remembering a glorious yet vanished past (250- 251). Thus, a South that was in economic ruin following the Civil War26 would seem to have more in common with its majority of common whites whose existence was based upon the fantasy of an Old South that never truly carved out the “natural” elevated space it promised all white men. The economic lag that characterized the South during Reconstruction helped solidify its status as exploited by a powerful North reaping the benefits of its victory. This exploitation became more aligned with the poor economic state of the South’s common whites, those who would take pride in rebuilding a region that was beaten by “America,” while never losing its sense of its own region’s “Americanness.” For the South, this loyalty was tried and true, an identity hammered out in defeat. Despite the romantic myths of southern toughness, defiance, and sense of its self as American—the connotators behind the flag that were utilized in support of “heritage” during the debate—someone would have to answer for the evils of the South’s white supremacist system. “Heritage” can not omit parts of a culture that still remain as ideals within modern society that exist as part of the flag’s signification. Confederate soldiers fought to uphold white supremacist ideology in reality even if they perceived that the fight was about preserving a region and a way of life that forged southern identity. The idea of southern “heritage” is inextricably bound with this identity that depended upon a white supremacist system that mystified class relationships and maintained the power of the planter class over the common whites.27 Expressing this discrepancy—shards of an ideology that allowed many whites to be simultaneously empowered and disempowered—left many working-class whites largely silenced in the debate, even as they shouted progressively louder that the flag signified “heritage.” White, rowdy, and working-class, they were too often dismissed by flag opponents as rednecks.

26 According to C. Vann Woodward in The Burden of Southern History, in 1880 the per capita wealth of the South, based on estimated true valuation of property was $376 as compared with $1,186 for nonsouthern states. The per capita wealth of the South was 27 percent of that of the northeastern states (17). 27 According to Snay, during the war the Confederate Congress excused every planter who owned 20 or more slaves from military service while the smaller farmers were denied the rights to come home on furlough, even if his family was in a state of “distress or want” (“Freedom and Progress: The Dilemma of Southern Republican Thought during Radical Reconstruction 104). 43 In “Sophisticated People Versus Rednecks: Economic Restructuring and Class Difference in America’s West,” Jarosz and Lawson differentiate between “good” rednecks and “bad” rednecks. Those who self-identify as rednecks today see themselves as good people, “honest, hardworking, resilient, tough, enduring, patriotic, proud religious manual laborers.” On the other hand, those who define others as rednecks often use the term derogatorily to cast aspersions on the white working class and poor people primarily from the rural South (9). Of course, the contradiction is that self-identified rednecks wish to associate themselves with all the glory of manly southern grit that Condon romanticizes with his notions of “poor farmers defending their homes.” Those who wish to disassociate themselves from rednecks view these individuals as ignorant, lazy, racists—the overtly negative qualities that characterize those “others” in the South who supported the flag. With such an extreme binary in place, the redneck can be little more than a caricature, either a hardy manly type or a rowdy racist. The redneck becomes a type of white, the foil for white, liberal, middle-class guilt (11). White southerners who supported the Confederate flag’s presence atop the dome united in support of “heritage,” all those qualities associated with the “good ol boys,” those positive qualities self-proclaimed rednecks ascribe to themselves. But, as Howard Dean found out in 2001 when he made the controversial statement that he wished to be the candidate of “guys with Confederate flags in their pick-up trucks,” self-proclaimed rednecks wearing t-shirts with Confederate flag insignia can define themselves however they wish, yet there is always an other public aware of other ideals. There are other shards of remembrance in which a northern, white middle-class man running for office may not wish to identify. Even within the South, business leaders and politicians who initially supported the flag were forced to consider the racial connotations behind the flag when an economic boycott enacted by the NAACP threatened the state’s tourism industry. A 1999 bill introduced into the House of Representatives requested that the NAACP end its boycott of South Carolina because it was heightening racial tensions in the South and (as the bill emphasizes first and foremost), local businesses that were “innocent bystanders in the flag debate and had nothing whatsoever to do with the flag controversy” were losing millions of dollars of revenue (Trotter). Democratic Senator Maggie Glover expressed the sentiment of the NAACP’s decision to boycott when she said, “South Carolina needed to realize that she was losing money because of that flag.

44 Then businesses—those white folks who were hit in their pocketbooks—would force the structures of this state to deal with the Confederate flag” (Prince 200). Thus, the white politicians and business leaders who had most adamantly supported the flag in the early 1990’s, began changing their positions when they realized that South Carolina “heritage” cannot be preserved in a bubble, that the South’s identity relied on the economic activity spurred on by outsiders. True to Jarosz and Lawson’s discussion of rednecks, those who would most visibly remain in support of the flag by the time it was moved from the State House dome in July 2000 were working-class whites. These individuals were left to answer for the racial sins of the South as the middle class, moved by an economic imperative and the negative publicity outside of the South, began to concede the flag’s racist connotations. In an extensive interview with Democrat Tom Turnipseed, a political figure in South Carolina politics since the 1970s, J. Michael Prince records the politician’s feelings about the “heritage” supporters of the Confederate flag. After claiming that he too was once “duped by Dixie” and the idea of the Reconstruction’s Lost Cause (for Turnipseed identifies as a one time segregationist), he speaks frankly of those who, unlike himself, still cling to the flag as economic similarities breed racial contempt. He says, “…these folks have exactly the same socioeconomic problems that poor black people do. They’re poor too….The schism has been kept alive ever since the slave days: You might be a poor-off white guy, but you’re better off than they [poor blacks] are” (95). These folks that Turnipseed references, those “others,” are clearly the white working class and working poor. Turnipseed charges that these individuals should just let go, allow the flag to be moved as a symbolic gesture to concede that “there is something wrong with everything that the flag stands for” (95). While Turnipseed correctly identifies the remnants of white resentment during Reconstruction when common whites especially were forced to compete with newly freed black individuals for economic sustenance, he does not address the fact that this competition was first and foremost the result of class mystification that would unify all whites to uphold the power of the planter class. He displaces the racism of the South onto the white working class and working poor while ignoring this group’s felt need to be articulated as something more complicated than the South’s white racists. Also, he ignores the reality that white racism exists among the white middle class as well. By the end of the debate those left holding onto the flag were not white men united to uphold

45 white supremacy as in the Civil War South, but were more visibly the white working- class individuals who must be racists, since feigning “heritage” as a signification is clearly incomplete. Inquiries into the symbol’s racist connotations truly began when white men in power realized that their positions depended upon conceding that the most visible ideal corresponding with the flag’s various parts was race. Recirculation of the flag in a variety of racist contexts and the media representation that framed its appearance only reinforced the idea that the flag was racist, and that racism is its most realized when the flag is associated with the white working class. With the race question driving the argument, those supporting the flag became quite simply the rural, working-class rednecks through media representation surrounding the Confederate flag debate. A sharp reader of The State points out the trend to write about pick-up trucks and stories about “crackers, Southern backwardness, ignorance, and bigotry.” She notes the taste for stories that tend to confirm stereotypes of the South— that the majority of southerners “drive around in pickup trucks with gun racks, the bumpers and back windows covered with little Confederate flag stickers.” She insightfully notes that pick-up trucks are not just affiliated with the South or “crackers,” but sell well countrywide (Brooks 1B). Tropes such as mobile homes, pick-up trucks, and Confederate flag t-shirts, all items associated with the working class, dominated the newspaper in articles about individuals who supported the flag. Not surprisingly, articles discussing racist activities in the South often emphasized that an event happened in a rural area, the areas in South Carolina were the majority of the working class reside. Representations that equated the white working class with racists were more powerful than the voices of individuals trying to disassociate themselves from racism in the way that their middle-class counterparts did, but were unwilling to allow the flag to be lowered. Articulating the discrepancy of ideology—class mystification that would simultaneously empower the common white man by giving him a sense of identity as a white patriarch, while disempowering him by keeping him from indulging in the same power class as the planters—has become delegated to the Confederate flag. As Julie Lindquist writes of her white, working-class subjects in A Place to Stand, these individuals are both mainstream in that they are white, but marginalized because they are working-class. They do not have the political consciousness as “other,” and as a result have a conflicted identity because they feel both empowered and marginalized (118). As

46 a symbol, the flag can “articulate” the shards of southern remembrance for the common white man of the Antebellum South. He was promised power by virtue of his whiteness and maleness, yet he never realized it in the way those truly in power did. He cannot articulate why this is; the southern system did not allow him a voice to do so within the dominant ideological discourse. This white man remains in the collective southern consciousness as he looks to the symbolic to write his presence.

47 Chapter 3 The Lack: Complicated Identities within a Narrative of Racial Healing

The South Carolina Legislature’s decision to relocate the Confederate flag from atop the State House dome to the Confederate memorial grounds commemorated the concession that the flag’s racist connotations were too pervasive to ignore. An ideological system that justified the enslavement of human beings based upon skin color could never be forgotten, even if competing narratives of the Old South (such as the ones proclaiming southern “heritage”) had to be suppressed for the sake of remembrance. As “heritage” feigns to unite all southerners, the Confederate flag’s presence atop the State House symbolized the unified interests of all South Carolinians, those interests that the State is in place to preserve. As many flag opponents pointed out, connotations of racial injustice inherent in a historical flag do not correlate with the duties of a living body politic. At the same time, flag proponents charged that the positive qualities they associated with “heritage” were the very qualities that gave the South its essence as a region; to ignore this history is to deny its unique sense of self that continues to shape all its citizens regardless of race. Of course, the problem with both arguments is that while the former de-emphasizes the value of the South’s sense of this self as defined by its Civil War history, the latter seeks to remember a region’s historical essence while forgetting the racist atrocities that were key to defining this essence. As a symbol, the Confederate flag becomes the material proof of the negotiation between remembrance and forgetting, that which creates history. As discussed in chapter two, an iconic symbol such as the Confederate flag mediates between the world of practical relationships, the contexts in which these relationships occur, and the abstract ideals that are representative of these relationships. Although the flag was located below both the American flag and the South Carolina state flag on the dome, individuals questioned the flag’s presence hovering above the various publics below. North and South alike faced the question: Did the Confederate flag’s overarching meanings deserve the presence given to those flags that signify the highest place within the state government? The difficulty of answering such a question lies in the flag’s complex connotations. The flag cannot have one meaning that facilitates a yes/no answer, yet the public was forced to make a decision about defining the visual in order to determine its appropriate context. As in memory construction, some meanings would 48 have to take precedence while others would be suppressed, all within the discourse of the dominant ideology. In the analysis that follows, I will situate the Confederate flag within a media constructed narrative in the southern and northern parts of the United States that highlighted the racist connotators behind the flag in an effort to construct meaning derived from the visual. Photographs capturing the debate that were featured in southern and northern newspapers reinforced the racist connotators inherent in the flag as the debate became the story of a South coming to terms with its racist past and a culture coming to terms with its ideology through memory construction. In the years between the NAACP’s resolution in 1987 that called for the removal of Confederate flag insignia, and the flag’s removal from atop the South Carolina state house dome in 2000, the fight over the flag’s signification became the story of compromise between white individuals largely supportive of the flag’s presence on public sites and black individuals largely opposed to it. The moment to commemorate the decision to move the flag to the Confederate monument was framed to stress racial healing and peace even as the white working-class majority vehemently protested the decision. I will focus my investigation by rhetorically analyzing images that captured key moments in the debate in 1996, 1998, and 2000, images chosen for their visual power to construct the greater narrative as it unfolded in South Carolina. Since context is crucial to an understanding of the power of the visual—whether the visual is a photograph, a drawing, or an iconic symbol such as the flag itself—I will situate the photographs capturing the Confederate flag debate within their respective contexts, within the text that surrounds the photographs as well as the cultural moments in which they appeared. Within the archives of the debate, images and text captured on microfilm, the Confederate flag—the iconic symbol—becomes a racist marker through signifying practices as white working-class individuals who contested this signification became, too simplistically, racists.

Image 1: S.C.’s Struggle

In early 1996, South Carolina’s governor was David Beasley, a white Republican who supported the Confederate flag’s presence atop the State House dome and the southern “heritage” he believed it signified. During this year, media around the country reported stories of black churches being burnt in the South (13 since 1991) and Governor 49 Beasley, whose state was now infamous for its determination to keep the Confederate flag flying, was pushed to address a national audience on ABC’s Nightline to answer for both the flag and the burnings. As the man in power who must speak for a state that was looking more racist than ever, Governor Beasley knew he was addressing an audience very different from his southern Republican constituents who were largely in favor of keeping the flag flying. Unable to articulate the complexities of southern “heritage” to an audience outside the South that would disassociate the flag from hate crimes, he opted to change his stance and ask for the Confederate flag’s removal. Republican Senator Arthur Ravenel recalls how party officials encouraged Beasley to reshape his flag stance to appeal to a national audience. He says, “They told him, man, David, you’re doing so good, you’ll end up on the ticket for vice-president!” (qtd. in Prince 181). When he appeared on Nightline he used the national platform to assert that the flag denoted southern “heritage,” but that “others” (racists and hate groups) had turned it into something more, a racist marker that could not be denied in the wake of racist crimes in the South. His new stance lost him many supporters and contributed largely to his 1998 loss of the gubernatorial election. Citizens writing into the “Editorials” section of The State in 1996 expressed contempt that Beasley sold out to a national audience, compromising his original notions of southern “heritage” when addressing the nation. Interestingly enough, in 2000 when the southern populace was tiring of the flag debate28 and the decision to move the Confederate flag passed in the State legislature, many people wrote into the “Editorials” and lauded Beasley’s heroism as a man who was willing to admit his mistake. In this four-year time span, the Confederate flag’s appearance in racist contexts increased as newspaper articles reinforced the flag’s connection with racist referents through repeated association, and by framing news stories to draw attention to the flag’s racial connotations. By 2000, media exposure pushed more individuals to see racism behind the flag where they had previously turned a blind eye, so much so that feigning ignorance of the flag’s connection with a racist agenda had become a willful rejection of the obvious. While Beasley was celebrated in 2000 for his foresight in 1996 that the flag could in fact signify racism, his discussion of the Confederate flag’s signification is incomplete. For Beasley, the flag as a symbol was first and foremost, “heritage,” the same

28 A condition referred to in the papers as “flag fatigue.” 50 signification that his white, working-class constituents adhered to, yet his understanding of the flag as an icon moved him to admit that its changing contexts had come to imbue it with racist meanings. Though he fails to recognize the symbiotic relationship among heritage connotators as well as racist connotators inherent in the flag’s role as a symbol of the Civil War South’s ideological system, he correctly recognizes that the flag can become more than a metaphor for the ideologies that were in place during its inception. Of course, he was only moved to make this concession when the audience in which he wished to identify changed. His foresight was in many ways the direct interest of a man with political aspirations. It was in 1996, amid church burnings, national scrutiny of the South, and South Carolina’s key politician changing his stance on the flag issue, that The State newspaper adopted the image of a black hand clutching the Confederate flag to signal to its readers that the article they were about to read pertained to the flag debate (See Image 1).

Image 1. Photo courtesy of The State (Columbia, SC).

The image is carefully arranged so that the St. Andrew’s cross design and the stars inside the cross that give the flag its distinctive look are unmistakable. The flag is positioned so that it extends from the top left corner of the panel and reaches into the bottom right hand corner of the panel, so that the eye moves across the image much in the same way it does to read text from top left to bottom right. A black fist reaches out from the bottom right hand corner of the panel and grips the flag unevenly, so that the flag visible above the fist is clearly the Confederate flag design, while the flag covering the wrist in the photo is more crumpled and less imposing. The image implies both passivity and aggression, for the hand looks as though it could actively be moving the flag, or it may be catching it.

51 Either way, the grip is excessively tight. Whether the fist is meant to move or catch, the black hand in the picture is responding passionately to the flag’s presence. The decision to include a black hand with an excessive grip to the image of a Confederate flag implies a visual constructed to fit within a racial narrative. For example, the image accompanies a December 1996 article that discusses black lawmakers in support of Governor Beasley’s decision to move the flag to the Confederate monument, a move the Governor felt would concede the racist connotations while still preserving the flag’s “heritage” significations (Askins A1). The imposition of a black hand on the article’s accompanying image of the Confederate flag imposes an intertextual reading onto the piece, for the hand resembles the Black Power Movement hand. The image is accompanied by the caption “Confederate Flag-S.C.’s struggle” and, as Barthes warns, the implementation of the caption naturalizes the denotation the viewer is supposed to get out of the image (“The Photographic Message” 41). Thus, the “struggle” visually references the Black Power Movement and South Carolina becomes synonymous with the fist, metaphorically “grasping” the flag issue, or with the flag, that which is being disturbed by an imposing black hand. The black fist aggressively utilizes the symbolic power of the flag, or responds to it as an act of resistance. Whether or not one sees the fist as passive or aggressive, however, the fact that the image hinges upon the flag’s racial connotations is clear. In fact, another manifestation of this recurring visual cue appeared in posters and flag designs carried by African-American flag opponents protesting the flag’s presence atop the dome. In a colored drawing, a black fist reaches upwards and clutches the flag in the center of the St. Andrew’s cross design. What is prominent in the design is the power of the fist to cut the flag in two. In both images the idea of a black fist clutching the Confederate flag is present, but in the second the fist either pushes upward or pulls downward, implying an act of defiance instead of defense. The visual image implies an active response on the part of South Carolina’s black community to get a handle on the Confederate flag and voice the flag’s racist connotations that need to be heard. Ultimately, the hand clutching the flag is not gendered or classed; it is raced. Even as it appeared alongside articles that discussed the negotiation between “heritage” and hatred on the part of elected officials— middle-class individuals both black and white, male and female—the image of S.C.’s struggle framed the Confederate flag as a racial marker.

52 Image 2: The Dark Man and the Falling Dome

The image of S.C.’s struggle was clearly a product of the newspaper itself. The strategic positioning of the fist and the artful way the folds of the Confederate flag surround it imply a staged photograph. As a trope that reappeared in issues of The State, the image allowed the newspaper to communicate an interpretation of the debate with subtlety, for it did not appear to be a verdict on the flag’s signification, but a signal to alert readers that the corresponding text addressed the flag issue in general. A discussion of an image’s innocence, however, is not as productive as inquiries into its various effects. While a staged image detracts from the innocence of a photograph, for it implies an agenda on the part of the producer of the image, this agenda does not always have the intended (either conscious or unconscious) effect upon the viewers of an image. As Hall asserts, the fact that a message could have a dominant connotation, that is, one that is preferred in the dominant society or culture, necessarily means that there are other connotations that must be negotiated (172). Discussions over the flag’s signification grew increasingly heated in 1998 when Governor Jim Hodges defeated Governor David Beasley in his bid for re-election. As is the case in any election year, the key issues of the state were discussed extensively. In the South, these key issues were education, legalizing video poker, and the Confederate flag’s presence atop the State House. A September 1998 article records the sentiment of former Columbia Chamber of Commerce Board Chairman and current CEO of Colonial Companies Bob Stanton who asserted that, “individuals outside of South Carolina have two impressions about the state. One is that education is at the bottom. The other is that the Confederate flag is at the top—of the State House” (Surratt B1). Editorials in the South began more frequent attacks on the idea that the flag signifies “heritage” by asserting that flag supporters were only furthering a racist agenda and that the memory of South is a racist one that should be remedied instead of reinforced. While Stanton’s comment reflects a growing interest on the part of business leaders and politicians to consider outside perceptions of the state and to attack the key issues with a national audience in mind, both Stanton’s comment and the growing sentiment of flag opponents were too dismissive of South Carolina “heritage” supporters. While many flag supporters were indeed outwardly racist, the ones who wrote to The State Editorials in 1998 as well as the years before and after clearly wished to disassociate themselves from Klan or racist activities. Of course, disassociating oneself 53 from the negative connotations of an image or the negative aspects of an ideology is not an unfamiliar redeeming move in the South. During Reconstruction, many southerners refused to acknowledge that the Civil War was in any way about keeping human beings in bondage. They asserted that the war was not about the social construction of differences between blacks and whites, but the differences between North and South. While the two sets of differences are inextricably bound, southerners adhering to the Lost Cause and southerners clinging to the flag are not all unified Klansmen with racist agendas first and foremost on their minds. However, individuals attempting to explain their anti-racist notions of “heritage” in small paragraph editorials were silenced as lengthier articles written by journalists addressed sensational stories about Klan activity and race relations in general. These pieces on white racism and the struggle for racial unity fit more neatly into a narrative of the flag that framed the debate in terms of black and white publics that believed the flag signified either “heritage,” or racism, “heritage” or “hate.” For instance, the Redneck Shop in Laurens, South Carolina, a novelty store that boasts the world’s oldest Klan museum and contains a variety of Civil War and Confederate flag memorabilia, appeared in southern papers repeatedly during the debate. The Chicago Tribune picked up on the shop’s sensationalism as well and reported on it in the midst of the controversy. Along with an article discussing the racist novelties in the store, The Tribune included the photograph of an African-American woman walking in front of the shop to emphasize the heightened racial contact zone in the South. Through image and text, a Chicago based newspaper framed the crux of the controversy as one of extremes, for an African-American woman in close proximity to a white racist novelty store implies a South divided not only by racial interests, but by the interests of African-Americans versus white racists. In addition to picking up the Redneck Shop story from southern papers, The Chicago Tribune also featured a photograph borrowed from The State, one that featured a dark male figure and a the state house dome with its three flags. Unlike the difference between the two figures juxtaposed in the Redneck shop article—an African-American woman and a racist shop—the relationship between the figure and the dome is clouded by the ambiguity of the photograph. Unlike the image of S.C.’s Struggle, the photograph is unnamed, an omission that only adds to the image’s ambiguity within the context of an election year where individuals questioned and asserted their stance on the flag issue more than ever.

54 Though the same photograph appears in both The State and The Chicago Tribune, the context surrounding the photo captures the different spirit in which the North and the South viewed the Confederate flag debate. The photograph itself is taken at such an angle as to include two primary figures: a dark, blurry figure whose presence takes up half the photograph, and the South Carolina State House dome with its three flags seemingly undisturbed by the wind taking up the other half (See Image 2).

Image 2. Photograph by Takaaki Iwabu, 1998. Courtesy of The State (Columbia, SC).

Each flag is stretched out so that it can be clearly identified, yet all three are largely motionless. Both figures are of interest within themselves; the ambiguity of the shadowy figure engages viewer participation, for it could signify a sinister individual, faceless, yet lurking with a very real threat to exert power. The figure could also connote someone whose facelessness will leave him (for the figure is clearly male) in the margins with the only real power being a presence, although it is an undefined one. The dome is in focus and captured through an upward shot so that the dome and the flags appear detached from the viewer, even more elevated and regal than they would appear from a viewer’s perspective looking up at the flags without the benefit of a moveable camera lens. At the same time, however, the dome is slanted to the right, at an angle off of 90 degrees, almost to insinuate that this majestic building and its flags that are unwaving, unmoving in a sense, are falling. While each figure within itself is a cause for study, the juxtaposition of the two figures taken within their respective contexts lend insight into the narrative of the

55 Confederate flag debate in a way that speculation over any one figure could not. When taken together, these two ambiguous figures in the shot capture the lack of clarity surrounding the debate. The dark blurry figure situated next to a regal yet falling dome could signify the presence of a marginalized individual of any race who has been left faceless yet takes an interest in viewing the flag and pondering its meaning. Without a facial expression, it is impossible to know whether the individual is enjoying the changing position of the dome (and its flags), or if he is expressing regret. However, the dome in focus and flags that are undisturbed even as the building seems to be falling create a sense of power over the faceless individual who appears to be a mere shadow. As a symbol of a body politic, with three flags in focus, the dome enacts the power of the unspoken symbolic in much the same way the dark figure has power in his facelessness, his undefined position in the margin that threatens to become an active force at any moment. Regardless of the power relationships that establish the two figures in the photograph, the timing of the shot clearly highlights a moment of contemplation. Though the man in the shot may or may not have been photographed during a passing glance at the dome, the image creates meaning through its timelessness, the pause that stretches out one look into a frozen moment of contemplation. The figure’s permanent act of looking connects the two figures as one’s meaning is defined by the other, and they are placed side by side metonymically. As the power of the spoken is often found within the power of the pause, a frozen glance forces those who view the photograph to position themselves as spectators processing the two key images in the photograph, while also moving them to identify with the faceless dark figure and to see what, in essence, he is seeing. The simultaneous role on the part of the viewer as spectator and as an individual aligned with the human figure in the frame takes on new meaning when considered within the context of the photographs in northern and southern papers. The image appears in The State as the photographic image that corresponds with the headline, “‘Take it Down!’ NAACP rally speaks out against battle flag and Beasley.” The caption makes clear the connotations that should be derived from the image by identifying the dark figure in the photograph as the past president of the Laurens29 County NAACP and allowing him a voice in the caption. He says, “We need to do what we have to do until

29 Ironically enough, home of the Redneck Shop. 56 the flag will be down. We will not stop” (Odom B1). The article continues by clarifying that these NAACP members are largely African-Americans protesting the presence of the flag atop the State House; thus, the image takes on new meaning as the dark figure becomes a black man determined to see the flag come down. To reinforce the idea of black power, the image of the black power movement hand appears above the photograph and beside the words, “Take it Down.” The ambiguous figure becomes a prominent black leader protesting the flag’s racial connotations. In turn, viewers of the photograph become both spectators considering the relationship between this man and the dome, as well as individuals who align themselves with the man and consider the flag’s connotations from his subject position. In the article, leaders speak out against Governor Beasley’s charges that the NAACP consists of liberal Democrats with political motivations by saying they “will not be defined by those who really don’t know us.” In the midst of discussions defining black subjectivity in the South and its connection with the Confederate flag, the staff writer devotes a small paragraph in the article to a white woman who was escorted from the rally by security after shouting protests. After she was taken away, she complained that “everything was always about black people.” Within the text accompanying the image, the NAACP protesters and the white woman express discontent at being wrongly defined by others. The protestors feel that a white governor cannot understand the extent of the racial connotations that the flag signifies to them so they respond by uniting based upon their shared identification with the flag. The white woman, ironically, makes her brief appearance in the article by complaining about the lack of attention given to those who are not united based upon the identifications shared among African-American flag opponents. Clearly, the story is framed to push the viewer to consider the racial connotations of the flag first and foremost, and to recognize the divisions between a NAACP united and a white governor and white woman who are out of sync with the way a black community views the flag’s racist connotations. What is deemphasized by assigning the dark figure the face of an African-American leader is the outsider position of the white woman or others like her who failed to complicate their notions of “heritage” outside of a racial narrative. The context of the image clarifies that the faceless figure is in fact a marginalized presence, an “other” because of his race. Similarly, the dark figure in the photograph cannot be the

57 white woman who feels marginalized in the debate, for the gender of the figure is clearly male. In contrast, the photograph of the dark man and the falling dome appeared in The Chicago Tribune but left the subject position of the dark figure unidentified. The man in the photograph is not black or white, but simply “Perry Leamon,” a man who is rallying against the Confederate flag (Glanton 1). Unlike the article in The State, with its heated headline, harsh words against Beasley, and a white woman upset at the media attention given only to “black people,” the Tribune article presents a watered down version of the story and calls the flag “A vivid reminder” of the Old South, one of many symbols that has “pitted blacks against whites, Republicans against Democrats and conservatives against liberals.” Once again, the flag debate is viewed in terms of simple binaries without a real analysis of fragmented ideologies and how the connotations picked up by the symbolic create complex identifications. Despite the move to leave the shadowy figure’s prominent position as an African-American leader unidentified, the image still occurs within the context of a racial narrative. More telling than the photograph of the two figures, the caption, or the article, is its context. The image and the article in the Tribune are given much less presence on the page as in The State. The story appears beneath a prominent, centered photograph of the Reverend Jesse Jackson meeting with AT&T chairman, C. Michael Armstrong. The image corresponds with an article addressing Jackson’s protest that more corporations should have African-Americans and Hispanics on their boards of directors. In the photograph, a somber Jackson listens to Armstrong who looks away as though his attention were directed elsewhere as he speaks. The emphasis is on black and white relations, as played out peacefully between politicians and business leaders, although the white business leader does not seem as invested in the conversation as the black politician does. While the focus in both stories is the flag’s racial connotations, the Tribune ignores the disgruntled white common citizen mentioned in The State, the woman who charges that her whiteness is essentially her invisibility. A heated racial epic with rowdy common whites on the margins in the South becomes in the North a story of race relations to be worked out among leaders, the middle class.

58 Image 3: The Compromise

In an editorial that appeared in February 2000, one month before the decision to move the flag from atop the State House dome, a native of Columbia wrote concise words in response to a lengthy debate: “Burn the flag. Sprinkle the ashes around the NAACP headquarters. Get back to work” (Shue A11). A debate originally about a flag denoting racism or “heritage” became reduced to a simplistic argument over whether or not the Confederate flag was racist. With a yes/no argument in place, white “heritage” proponents insisted ever more emphatically that the flag could never be about racism, that it was about something “else” they felt but could only feebly articulate as southern pride, an idea too easy conflated with “white pride.” The frustration led many individuals to become indifferent to the conflicting symbolic meanings that had split the South so divisively. As expressed in the editorial, the state had reached a point where many individuals were willing to admit the impossibility of reaching consensus pertaining to a symbol, so much so that it seemed easier to erase its existence altogether, to forget the question of context (did the flag belong atop the State House?), and give its remnants to the united sect that had most successfully interrogated its signification, the NAACP. Ironically, the split over the flag’s racial connotations only led to compromise when the racial narrative began to blur the color line. The compromise to move the flag was not reached until many white businessmen and politicians joined with African- American representatives and community leaders intent on doing what they believed was in the best economic interest of the state and concede the flag’s racist connotations. The State Legislature’s decision to remove the Confederate flag occurred less than a year after a NAACP boycott of South Carolina’s tourism industry. It was a decision made by the state’s politicians, though there were many calls for a referendum to allow the populace to determine the fate of the flag—a unique proposal that attests to the complexities of defining a visual and thus its appropriate context. The boycott that threatened South Carolina’s tourism industry, however, moved many white politicians and business leaders to change their stance on the Confederate flag’s signification as Governor Beasley had done in 1996. Just as the “Editorials” in 2000 celebrated former Governor Beasley’s ability to admit his mistakes and change his mind about the flag’s meanings, the May 19, 2000, issue of The State reported on the compromise decision to move the flag by highlighting moments that would reconcile white with black— politicians. 59 The story of white leaders initially in favor of leaving the flag flying only to change their minds and admit that the flag was about “heritage” and racism, is a modern day testament to the power of representation, those who find a way to fit their identities within cultural narratives, and those who are left in the margins. The concession on the part of many white leaders that the flag did have racist connotations while they still held to the flag’s “heritage” connotations allowed them the best of both worlds. They could become the newly enlightened white individuals in a racial narrative while holding onto a sense of southern pride they viewed as antecedent to the flag’s racial connotations. Once again, “southern pride” and “heritage” alike are composed of the ideological remnants of the Antebellum South. Pride in southern “heritage” involves valuing a white patriarchal culture with all its respective parts: an agrarian tradition, a sense of family, a sense of spirituality, a sense of regional self. However, these parts also include ideals that upheld a system where white men united viewed themselves as the “natural” dominators over women and the “natural” owners of the south’s property, including black slaves. To take on the flag is to take on the weight of all these connotations, for one ideal cannot be removed from the other within the realm of the symbolic. Although white leaders continued to mistakenly view “heritage” as something separate from the flag’s racial connotations, they positioned themselves within the narrative, a difference that separated them from many white working-class individuals determined to view the flag as “heritage” only. Of course, these leaders had the platforms in which to control the ways their associations with the flag were represented. In retrospect we do not remember Governor Beasley’s initial stance that the flag signified southern “heritage,” but the “Emergency Conference on Racism” that he hosted, his appearance on Nightline, and the flood of editorials following the flag’s removal that celebrated his enlightenment even during the early years of the debate in 1996. Although Governor Jim Hodges initially supported the flag’s “heritage” signification as well, he also changed his stance and was featured in a front page write-up following the flag’s removal. The article speaks of a governor intent on ending divisiveness for the sake of the children as he “[stands] silently in the majestic marble-floored lobby between the two legislative chambers” (Riddle 1, 8A). These white leaders were the ones who were willing to change for the sake of unity and became the great compromisers. Thus, the May 19th, 2000 headline of The State discussing the State Legislature’s decision to move the flag from atop the dome reads “Compromise at Last!” The picture

60 capturing the moment is as prominent as the headline: the white Senate majority leader, democrat John Land, places his arm around African-American senator John Matthews’s shoulder as they discuss and contemplate the compromise (See Image 3).

Image 3. Photograph by Erik Campos, 2001. Photo courtesy of The State (Columbia, SC).

The camera captures the two men head on as they discuss the decision, as if to insinuate the power of their presence and the ability to confidently face a viewership. The emphasis is on two powerful men, one white and one black, who have contemplated the situation and now face an audience that must accept the verdict—the Confederate flag’s significations do not afford it a place atop the State House. The differences between black and white are balanced by the invisibility of class markers or any attention to gender. Ultimately, the photograph captures camaraderie between two men of different races during the climax of a narrative that largely divided the state based upon racial differences. What is invisible in the photo is the ideological force that drives the union between these two individuals—a shared identification based upon their status as middle- class men. As the decision makers in southern society they have the power to determine the context in which an iconic symbol resides, even if they are unable to define its signification in such a way to completely unite dissident publics within the state, specifically the largely white working-class population.

61 Image 4: Shame

Following the Conservative sweep of the 1994 elections, Republican Senator John Courson commented on the message that the victory sent pertaining to the flag debate, “I would hope it sends a strong signal…that the conservatives won big Tuesday in this state….Most of the people who vote conservative are generally very supportive of our heritage” (Prince 172, emphasis mine). In the Compromise issue of The State however, he was photographed shaking hands with Senator Verne Smith, two white politicians happy over the compromise decision. The Senator who had argued time and again that the Confederate flag signified “heritage” instead of racism conceded the flag’s racist connotations in the end and was featured as an enlightened leader in the compromise. Senator Courson often argued for the flag’s presence atop the dome alongside fellow Senator Glenn McConnell. As part owner of the CSA art galleries in Charleston, McConnell’s shop features Civil War memorabilia that could be considered as racist as the novelties found in rural Laurens’ Redneck Shop. For example, the gallery features bumper stickers that read: “It’s a Southern Thing—You Wouldn’t Understand” and music boxes shaped like tiny cotton bales. During the ceremony on July 1, 2000, to move the flag from atop the State House, however, Senator McConnell expressed the sentiment that the flag probably should have never been atop the State House in the first place (Prince 246). The Confederate flag debate records white middle-class leaders who learned that they had to distance themselves from a flag that a large portion of their constituents believed denoted racism, especially in the midst of the NAACP’s boycott of the state and bad publicity nationwide. Though the economic imperatives no doubt goaded many key politicians to change their stance on the flag issue, it is too simplistic to charge that the South’s white leaders changed their minds about the flag primarily because of economic motives or publicity. As those located at the highest seats in power in South Carolina government, white middle-class leaders were forced to listen to all sides of the debate. Though pleasing one’s constituents is a means to more power, it is also a means to negotiate truth by sharing in fundamental warrants (we all want to do what is in the best interest of the state) and positioning oneself as a compromiser so that listening allows the mediator in the middle to complicate his/her own biases when deciding an issue. However, as the decision makers situated within a narrative of racial healing to understand the complexities of the symbolic, these individuals were forced to respond to 62 a binary—to support the flag’s presence atop the State House was to assert that it was not racist; to be opposed to the flag’s presence atop the State House was to concede that it was racist. The decision to take the flag down aligned white leaders with the individuals who believed the flag signified racism, the largely African-American community and many business leaders and middle-class whites. Ironically, the majority white working- class individuals insistent upon calling the flag “‘heritage’ not hate” became aligned with white supremacists who insisted the flag signified both “heritage” and hate. Situated between two extremes—flag opponents who insisted that the flag primarily signified racism, and racist flag proponents who insisted that the flag signified racism—the individuals who refused to reduce the flag to a racist marker were left with the impossibility of defining it outside of the context of a racist narrative. Of course, as many white middle-class leaders discovered, removing racism from the flag’s signification is impossible when the lived experience of the Antebellum South the flag came to signify relied upon white supremacist ideology. As the individuals left holding onto the flag, the white working class became Jarosz and Lawson’s “foil for white middle-class guilt,” racist rednecks to be defined against racially enlightened white leaders. Images capturing racial harmony between African-American and white politicians differed drastically from the images of white working-class protesters determined to assert that the flag was not about racism. Their protest rested on the assumption that there was something in the flag very much a part of their white working-class identity that was not being articulated as the debate played out in the media spectacle. What is interesting of course is that this “something” that unified the majority of the white southern population under the guise of “heritage” was abandoned by many middle-class whites as the complexities of such a concept were left for the white working class to articulate. Thus, the flag that appeared on the Civil War battlefield in 1861 that came to signify white men united, divided whites along class lines in 2000, a phenomenon that is much less prominent than the story of racial healing taken up during the debate. A photograph taken on the day that the Confederate flag came down illustrates the race/class complexities of the debate. One of the most prominent photos taken captures a

63

conversation between an African-American man and a white man while a white boy looks on (See Image 4).

Image 4. Photograph by Jason Clark, 2000. Photo courtesy of The State (Columbia, SC).

The two men are given equal prominence as both appear on either side of the frame. The boy and a Confederate flag being held by the white man are almost dead center between the two men as a crowd of mostly white individuals looks on. In the photo, an African- American man speaks passionately with a hand raised as a white man across from him wearing a baseball cap and t-shirt with Confederate flag designs appears stalwart and silent. The distance between them implies an exchange of different opinions, a gulf that separates white from black. The white man’s powerful build insinuates that he is a member of the working class while the Confederate flag wear aligns him with the redneck type, a Confederate flag supporter who adheres to the “heritage” argument and who may, or may not be a racist. The black man, on the other hand, wears a solid white t-shirt; it is difficult to tell if he is working-class like the white man across from him. The boy standing in between the two men wears a solid white t-shirt so that it is difficult to tell whether he aligns himself with the white man in rebel flag wear (the white working- class man), or with the African-American man speaking. Above the youth, a sign reading SHAME is visible.

64 In this photograph, as with the others, the color line dominates the visual. A white man and a black man are the key figures, placed in opposing positions so that they are engaging in a face-off of sorts. This photograph is reminiscent of the Compromise one, but unlike the image of unity between two men of different races who occupy the same government position, one with his arm around the other, the Shame photo emphasizes the space and difference between the two men. Also, while the Compromise photo is taken head on, the two figures in the Shame photograph are photographed from the side; they do not face the viewer, for it appears as though they are still working out the complexities of the flag between themselves. Although the black man has the power of speech, the white man clutches the Confederate flag in such a way that is reminiscent of images of S.C.’s struggle. Just as the black hand clutches the flag defiantly as if to answer its perceived meanings, the white man grips the flagpole in silence, letting the symbol, in all its manifestations (a flag, a t-shirt, a baseball cap) speak for him. The youth between the two men is charged with remembering the way the moment is framed in order to articulate the reasons why there is a gulf between these two men, for the sign that reads SHAME directly over his head insinuates that the racial divide between these two men is the future white man’s burden. The caption commenting on the moment seems to contradict the image as it speaks of supporters and protesters walking side by side during the day of the flag’s removal. Clearly, the caption seeks to emphasize unity on the part of flag opponents and proponents on the day to commemorate the compromise. However, it is difficult to imagine the two men in the Shame photograph walking side by side in the way that the two politicians stand side by side in the Compromise photograph. The narrative of racial healing does not work when the working-class white man is thrown into the mix, when he becomes the “other” white man, the real racist, the real hindrance to a narrative of racial healing because he refuses to compromise the belief that the Confederate flag should continue waving atop the dome. As the figure in the middle of the two men on a day of healing, the boy appears to be the new mediator, a member of the new generation of white men who learned to take the middle road between black and the white working class—the white middle class. However, the boy’s position in the middle of the two men could also insinuate the possibility of aligning himself with either figure, with the white man based upon a shared race and the “shame” of allowing the flag to come down, or with the black man who articulates the “shame” of allowing the flag to continue flying.

65 Regardless of the specific shame that could be read into the photograph alone, the context and caption feign unity in a way that is reminiscent of stories and photographs of white and black politicians learning to negotiate the flag’s meanings. The discord between the caption and the photograph, however, captures the lack of unity between a black man and a white working-class man. The ambiguous presence of the youth invites questions about the flag’s significations and those who choose to associate or disassociate themselves with it even on the day when its fate, and thus, its signification were supposedly determined. The presence of the white working-class populace during the cultural moment of the Confederate flag debate prevented a narrative of racial healing with an uncontested happy ending that determined the flag’s signification.

Images 5 and 6: Two Citadel Cadets

The Shame photograph that emphasized the differences between black, and white and working-class, appeared along with a photograph of two Citadel cadets in the July 2, 2000, issue of The State. To commemorate the day of healing, a simple ceremony was planned to lower the flag from the dome correctly, that is, to remove the Confederate flag from its sovereign context while being sensitive to the competing connotations that a variety of South Carolina publics had ascribed to it. Thus, two Citadel cadets, one white and one black, were responsible for folding the newly lowered Confederate flag and handing it over to South Carolina Governor Jim Hodges. The Governor, in turn, handed the cloth over to two representatives of the State Museum (one white and one black) where the flag was to reside.

66 In an Associated Press photograph capturing the moment, the one featured in The State, the hands of the cadets come together as they participate in the last move of folding the Confederate flag (See Image 5).

Image 5. Photo courtesy of Accuweather/AP Press, 2000.

As with the photograph of the Dark Man and the Falling Dome, the angle in which the photo is taken creates meaning. The photographer takes the picture from an upward angle so that the viewer feels as if he/she is looking up at a moment that deserves reverence. The picture is slanted so that the white cadet is featured prominently on the left side of the frame while the American flag and the South Carolina state flag that were atop the dome but have been lowered along with the Confederate flag, appear prominently on the right side. Both the white cadet and the flags seem to be slanting inward towards the African-American cadet who is centered in the shot, while the camera angle places him in the background respectively. Once again the image hinges upon the interaction of the figures. Meaning is created through their juxtaposition. The relationship between the cadets is complicated through the prominence of the white cadet in a closer shot, and the decision to center the black cadet who is more distanced in the picture. Different viewers could perceive the two men differently; for the centeredness of the black cadet could imply his prominence or his distance, while the close-up shot could imply the white man’s prominence or his lesser role as one who is not centered in the shot. More importantly than the power dynamic of the two figures however, is the prominent presence of the two flags. The American flag especially takes up the majority of the frame. In fact, the location of the cadets seems relative to the need to get the American flag centered in the shot. As the

67 two cadets actively fold the flag, the American flag symbolizes the “Americanness” of the moment, the active unity on the part of a white man and a black man, both of whom are a part of the Citadel’s military tradition. The irony is that while the flag that brought about the occasion, the Confederate flag, is the center of attention for both of the cadets as they fold it, it is barely visible in the shot. The American flag resides above it signifying a moment where one floating signifier swallows up the other. Once again, in an image of racial harmony, two men, one black and one white, become the key figures in determining the flag’s signification. The fact that the two men are of different races implies that the icon being relocated on a day of commemoration largely derived its meanings based upon racial differences that have now been reconciled. The presence of two Citadel cadets folding the flag is indicative of an effort to pacify southern “heritage” supporters, for the Citadel is a military university with roots grounded in the South’s Confederate history, one very much in line with the idea of brave manly soldiers who were once “poor farmers defending their homes” (Frank A10). Thus, “southern pride” in having two Citadel cadets fold the Confederate flag and put it away emphasizes the mythic ideal of rag tag soldiers unified against the North, while the presence of an African-American cadet neutralizes the white supremacist ideology in which these men fought to preserve. However, the unity inside the State House differed drastically from the protests on state grounds. As with the caption under the Shame photograph, The State frequently discusses flag supporters and opponents marching “side by side” as the flag was lowered from inside. Members of the NAACP participated in a “silent march” and sang “The Black National Anthem” and “We Shall Overcome” as flag supporters participating in a Million Rebel March sang “Dixie” to drown out the African-American voices. The article describes “yelps, boos, and hollers” from the Million Rebel Marchers, some of whom are described wearing t-shirts that read, “Kiss My Rebel Ass.” Clearly, the notion of individuals marching “side by side” is a bit too optimistic when flag supporters and opponents were still clearly arguing the flag’s signification. Also, the emphasis on NAACP members supporting the decision to move the flag downplayed the presence of many white individuals who were also in favor of the flag’s removal and who held up signs with the word “Shame” as their African-American counterparts did (the same sign that appeared over the boy’s head in the Shame photograph). Clearly there was a division between peaceful NAACP members, African-

68 Americans happy with the narrative’s progression, and white individuals wearing rebel flag t-shirts who felt the narrative was unfolding at the risk of their exclusion, that the narrative was assigning significations to their iconic symbol under terms that were not theirs. The active folding of the Confederate flag and an American flag symbolizing the verdict of the Confederate flag debate in the South differed from the photograph of the cadets featured in a Chicago Tribune article reporting on the landmark event. Once again, as with the image of the Dark Man and the Falling Dome featured in the Tribune, the article and the image were given less prominence in the northern newspaper. In fact, the image of the cadets appears just above an article about 12,000 chicken salad sandwiches being recalled in seven states. Clearly, the Tribune felt the moment was a little less important than The State which devoted the majority of the July 2nd issue to the Confederate flag and how southerners viewed it. The greater representation in the South not only implies the Confederate flag’s “southernness,” for the flag has appeared as an iconic symbol outside of the South as well, but that the South’s understanding of its ideology, the ideals and identifications that gave rise to the South the flag signified at its inception, still leaves much to be explored. As the masses of flag supporters present on the Columbia state grounds attests, the South still has strides to make in understanding itself and explaining its self to outsiders. The Associated Press photograph chosen by the Chicago Tribune to report South Carolina’s day of commemoration provides clues to the differences between the two regions. While the Tribune also chose an image of the cadets to remember the day the flag came down, the moment captured on film is far removed from the active movements of flag folding featured in The State Outside the State House, the two Citadel cadets walk side by side with the African-American cadet holding the folded flag with his head

69 up as he marches forward, and the white cadet beside him with his head down (See Image 6).

Image 6. Photo courtesy of Accuweather/AP Press, 2000.

The article itself mentions the signs carried by flag opponents that read “Shame” and the fact that those unhappy with the decision to move the flag blew whistles as the flag was lowered. Brett Bursey, director of the South Carolina Progressive Network is quoted as saying, “We’re blowing the whistle on racism,” a comment that aligned all flag supporters with racism, white redneck “others,” left to answer for the racial connotations in the flag (Riddle 1, 8A). Unable to articulate the need to cling to the flag as the unspeakable way to unspeak racist ideology, these individuals opted for rhetorical performance that united them based upon their “felt” identities, the desire to be more complicated than the mythological southern white racists. At the very least they became a unified body of whistle blowers. The active movement between a white and black man to fold the flag is reduced as the white cadet with his head down reminds the reader of the SHAME signs discussed in the article. The SHAME clearly becomes the shame of racism, what is essentially signified by individuals blowing whistles in protest of the day’s events. While both photographs capture the same general event, the connotations derived from them, that which signifies the flag’s meaning, differs greatly in the two photos.30 While both rest on

30While I could access the image of the two Citadel cadets that appeared in The State, the photograph of the cadets that appeared in the Tribune was unavailable. The other image was omitted since it basically captured the same thing, a discomforting omission that I was informed happens rather frequently with public photographs. 70 the divisions between black and white, the white cadet in a Citadel military uniform, the identification meant to pacify white “heritage” supporters, is captured in the timelessness of a photograph with his head down in shame. It is a position that contrasts greatly with the African-American Citadel cadet who appears to be marching confidently and who holds the flag after both cadets have folded it together. What is greatly missed in this symbolic gesture acted out on State House grounds and captured in both images is that the two cadets ultimately handed the flag over to a white governor, a white man in power who was part of a political gesture to create the narrative of how the symbolic would be remembered in a key moment defining its signification. Individuals willing to concede the flag’s racist connotations ultimately fit into the grand narrative. Those outside blowing whistles on the State House grounds who were sensationalized in both southern and northern newspapers would protest feebly as the flag would be removed to a museum, a place of memory where the perceived identities they could not articulate would not fit.

Image 7: The Lack

The front page of the July 2, 2000, issue of The State featured a large drawing of the South Carolina State House dome with its two flags: the South Carolina state flag and, above it, the American flag (See Image 7).

Image 7. Drawing by Tracy Glantz, 2000. Photo courtesy of The State (Columbia, SC).

More important than the presence of the two, however, was what was not present—all of the connotations inherent in one Confederate flag that had been removed. There was no

71 headline or text discussing the image, no caption, just a drawing of the dome, two flags, and the lack of a presence that once had been. Articulating the meaning behind such an image is extremely difficult, for without text surrounding the drawing, there is no language attempting to naturalize a denoted image. Ultimately the drawing is framed to communicate the visual manifestation of silence, for it is an image capturing the disappearance of an image. Taken within the context of the special edition newspaper capturing the Confederate flag debate, however, we can talk about what its absence means, for the image implies a context where viewers are supposed to recognize that a Confederate flag used to fly atop the dome. As viewers are forced to actively engage and recognize that something that used to exist now does not, they recollect the arguments that surrounded the flag’s signification, the divisions that arose among a variety of people sharing both a language and a culture. They are forced to account for what meanings are missing now that the material manifestation of those meanings is no longer visible, and where these meanings will manifest themselves in the future. The words of the Star Spangled Banner attest to the power of a flag that waves over a public, for the lyrics celebrate rockets and bombs as “proof” that the flag sill waves “over the land of the free and the home of the brave,” a civilization that still exists.31 The absence of the flag actively waving within the context of the Confederate flag debate insinuates that the symbol of a civilization has been interrogated, its various meanings have been acknowledged and addressed, and now the flag can be folded and put away for the sake of remembering those acknowledged meanings. The insistence to keep the flag flying by a majority of white working-class southerners, however, implies that all meanings have not been interrogated. The irony of the drawing is that its motionless contrasts greatly with the movement the moment signifies, for the Confederate flag that was once atop the State House dome did not vanish, but appears on t-shirts, baseball caps, bandannas, bumper stickers, etc. It has become the iconic symbol of the redneck. The move on the part of many white working-class individuals (self identified and outsider perceived rednecks) to display Confederate flag insignia, to literally wear it on

31 Barry discusses a rhetorical move on the part of Adolph Hitler to unite the German Nazi party in the years leading up to WWII. He would read Germany’s losses articulated in the Treaty of Versailles and, with each spoken loss, he lowered the Nazi flag. Just when the flag (and the morale of his audience) were at the lowest he would proclaim, “You are not dead; you live in Germany” (55) 72 their bodies is a defiant move, very much in line with “rebel” mentality to force those who disapprove of it to ponder the possibility that there are meanings behind it that can not be put to rest yet. Like the arguments that only proceeded to get louder as flag proponents insisted that the flag signified “heritage,” the answer to the flag’s absence atop the State House has been to exhibit it even more by displaying it on the body. Although the context has changed, the visibility of the flag still invites inquiries into its signification, for the Confederate flag debate was less about the flag’s presence atop the dome and more about its meaning in general, a phenomenon that will no doubt repeat itself regardless of where the flag appears. Interestingly enough, though context is a secondary consideration when questioning the flag’s signification, its competing meanings are derived from its contexts and the signifying practices that create them. Thus, the flag no longer flying atop the dome can be perceived as more racist than ever following the decision to “end” a racist narrative by changing the Confederate flag’s context. The fact that the image of absence captured in 2000 did not end the debate over the flag’s signification, however, provides evidence that the symbol of the Civil War South still contains ideals that are alive in the South. As a symbol, it can connote southern “heritage,” and within this concept, a notion of class that is so deeply hidden and embedded within the ideological threads of the Antebellum South and the modern day cultural consciousness that it becomes difficult to truly investigate or talk about it. The flag can articulate what the fragmented ideals of southern ideology cannot—the need to deny other identities that may undermine one’s own. The concession that the flag means racism implies that the identifications upholding a distinctly southern mentality were perversely defined, specifically, that southerners were “duped by Dixie.” In a culture historically grounded in an inattention to class relationships and the promise of white supremacy, the Confederate flag’s presence attests to the need to interrogate meanings in addition to race as the white working class is left clinging to the proof that racial healing will not cure all the South’s war scars. As a flag that signifies ideological processes: the process in which a person with black skin can become dehumanized, the process in which a white man who does not rule is undefined, the process in which an identity can convince itself that it is infallible, the Confederate flag’s presence forces us to argue our similarities and differences, processes that perpetuate cultures.

73 Conclusion

The March 31, 2006, issue of The Morning News, a newspaper based in Florence, South Carolina, reports the story of a 15-year old girl from the state who attempted to wear Confederate flag themed t-shirts to school only to be told by school officials to turn them inside out or to change clothes. In retaliation she and her family filed a lawsuit under the counsel of the Southern Legal Resource center (SLC), a group based in North Carolina to preserve Southern Confederate “heritage.” In the photograph accompanying the story, the girl and her parents hold up the three t-shirts she got into trouble for wearing: one with a Confederate flag design and the word “southern,” one with baby chickens standing on a Confederate flag and the words “Southern Chicks,” and one with the South Carolina state seal (the Confederate flag insignia is not visible in the picture). School officials justified their actions by asserting that the display of Confederate flag clothing could be “potentially disruptive” (Bell A1). The story appeared on the front page of the newspaper a little less than six years after the South Carolina State Legislature’s decision to remove the Confederate flag from atop its dome. While the heated debate in the late 1990’s that forced South Carolina to face the Civil War ideology that its most infamous symbol came to signify may seem more newsworthy on the surface than the story of a teenage girl wearing a t-shirt adorned with a Confederate flag and chickens, both cultural moments attest to the power and pervasiveness of the visual. The flag that was designed in 1861 to unify the South against the North during the Civil War has been lifted out of its original context and used liberally to unify a vast array of publics with similar, and oftentimes, competing interests. For example, during the debate a company that referred to itself as NuSouth felt that the way to solve the flag problem, to unite the racial interests of the state, was to create a “Nu” flag that more accurately captured the southern experience in 2000. They maintained the Confederate flag design to appease “heritage” supporters while altering the flag’s coloration to resemble the African liberation flag to communicate the black experience in the South. The two flags together in one form were intended to communicate a racial compromise. As the Confederate flag design is altered to include other designs, however, the connotators in the original must compete with connotators in the new design, creating in essence a conversation between metaphors. Though such an act it creates the situation in

74 which a visual is explained, emphasized, and/or counteracted by another visual, it still does not bypass the question of signification, for the Confederate flag and the African Liberation flag could signify racial harmony, or one could be viewed as aggressively imposing its connotations upon another. During the controversy many pro-flag “heritage” supporters dismissed the Nuflag as a gimmick that, once again, emphasized the flag’s connection to racial issues. Others, however, even suggested replacing the Confederate flag atop the dome with the NuSouth design. The manipulation of the Confederate flag design is relevant to an understanding of how diverse publics control the signification process as it constructs their identities. However, an individual does not have to alter the flag for this process to take place. For example, although the 15-year old girl discussed in the Morning News did not change the Confederate flag design in any way, by exhibiting it on her t-shirt along with the word “southern,” the image of the state seal, and images of baby chickens, she creates new associations that imbue the icon with meaning as it is associated with the images and text on her t-shirt. At the same time, the flag already has connotations of its own that are perceived by others who view her and associate her identity with those connotations they perceive—meanings that may or may not be in line with the identity she feels she is exhibiting. While she may genuinely think that she is merely expressing “southern pride,” as the Confederate flag debate demonstrated, others may see her as proclaiming racist attitudes. Neither perception can be taken for granted. As an icon that is bought and sold, the flag’s relevance to class studies becomes more important than ever, for selling the flag is selling a lifestyle and too often the displacement of negative characteristics onto Confederate flag waving rednecks is done so with the justification that such an identity is one’s lifestyle choice (Jarosz and Lawson 10). Country music star John Rich of the duo Big and Rich explains the difference between the redneck lifestyle an individual “buys into” versus the one that is displaced onto them. In a USA Today article, he addresses his response to those who call him a redneck. He says, [If someone says] “Man, you ain’t nothin’ but a crazy redneck, we’ll have a beer together. But [if they say] Man, that John Rich is just a stupid redneck—they say it like that I don’t like it” (Mansfield 6). Such a definition exhibits the paradox of defining oneself outside of dominant discourses; for while a redneck mentality is an active way of asserting one’s identity, it also ignores the relevance of class structures that allow alternate performances of class to

75 take place. As comedian Jeff Foxworthy demonstrates in his “You Might Be a Redneck If…” routine, to be a redneck is to exhibit a “glorious lack of sophistication,” and to defiantly enjoy it. While Foxworthy maintains pride in his redneck southern roots although he frequently jokes about his move to Beverly Hills following his stardom (much like Jed Clampett of the Beverly Hillbillies), he exemplifies the rare instance of class mobility associated with Confederate flag loving rednecks. Similarly, as the title of country music star Toby Keith’s new album attests, it is possible to be “white trash with money”—when it is all about the lifestyle. As the Confederate flag has been moved from atop the dome and onto t-shirts, bandannas, and bumper stickers, individuals determined to exhibit the flag to perform a “rebel” mentality should not forget the racial connotations that allowed the flag’s removal in the first place. When redneck becomes a lifestyle choice instead of a class issue, it becomes easier than ever to allow a variety of individuals of all genders, races, and classes to perform the defiant caricature and wave Confederate flags while forgetting that the flag was once a banner of slavery. While the “choice” to be a working-class white individual displaying the flag may seem like a liberating way to create an identity, it also perpetuates class mystification and the notion of rural, white, working-class racists. The symbol of the Civil War South is becoming a t-shirt, an icon worn close to the body to provide a sense of comfort that one’s sense of identity is as real as the materiality of the flag. At the same time, however, this “realness” does not exist within the context of real power structures such as state house domes. Speaking about the visual is, in essence, identity construction. As exhibited in the Confederate flag debate, until we learn to “speak” intelligently about what is verbally “written” in imagery, our verbal arguments will only continue to get progressively louder. Such speaking involves an understanding that saying what a symbol means undermines its nature as an iconic identity text that is constantly being negotiated, and that any compromise involves questioning the nature of one’s perceived reality. The power of the Confederate flag as a floating signifier is that its nature as a visual metaphor forces publics into discussions where they are bound to disagree. It is not a meaning but a medium that allows individuals to negotiate identities as they populate living cultures.

76 Appendix

Paper: State, The (Columbia, SC)

Title: Both Sides? There Are Many, Many Sides on the Flag Issue

Author, Brad Warthen, Editorial Page Editor

Date: January 30, 2000

Section: EDITORIAL

Page: D2

I frequently hear from readers who want to keep the Rebel flag atop our State House, exhorting me to “tell both sides” of the story.

And when they do that, I always think: Both sides? What do they mean, both sides? Do they really think there are only two? That’s the great American fallacy, of course. The bipolarity myth, the modern twist on the dualism heresy. We like to think of things in terms of one or the other, black or white, Democrat or Republican, liberal or conservative, up or down, yes or no, for me or against me. The press, God help us, encourages this; people in my business like to keep things simple, the easier to write about them on deadline.

But it doesn’t reflect the world accurately, and that in turn makes it harder to achieve solutions on such issues as the flag, which has such ability to polarize us when we look at it simplistically.

The truth is that there are almost as many different positions on the flags as there are people who have positions. We have to understand that if we’re going to arrive at the kind of consensus decision that pulls as many of us together as possible, converting this from an issue that divides us into one that unites us.

So in the interest of furthering this discussion, allow me to offer just a few of the broad, and admittedly crude, categories into which I see people falling on the issue. I offer them in no particular order:

*Johnny Rebs: These are true believers in the Lost Cause, and there is great variety even within this category. Some are re-enactors; some just practice ancestor worship, Charleston-style. Some are history buffs who really mean it when they say “heritage”; others actually still think secession is a mighty fine idea.

*Billy Yanks: Or maybe I should just say, “Yankees,” or “Outsiders,” since these people aren’t into the Civil War the way the Rebs are. These are the recent arrivals who look at the flag and say, “Whatsammata with’ youse people down ‘ere, uh?” Or something like that.

77 *The Disaffected: Largely working-class whites who see the efforts to move the flag as another ploy by “suits” and minorities and the cultural elite to impose something on them without their having a say.

*White Racists: They’re out there, believe me, since I hear from them a lot. Keeping the flag up, for them, is purely a matter of rubbing something in black folks’ faces and showing who’s still the boss.

*Black Racists: They decided long ago t hat there’s no way you can trust the Man. They like the boycott not because it will lead to resolution, but because the Man will never do the right thing unless you make him.

*Nouveau Republicans: Their daddies were Dixiecrats, and they’re just like their daddies, but they made the switch when they perceived the GOP to be the White Man’s Party.

* Ancien Republicans: The country club set, old-line economic conservatives. They’ve got nothing against black folks, or for them either. Blacks aren’t on their radar screen. They are very uncomfortable sharing a big tent with Nouveau Republicans but scared to rile them up.

* Movement Nostalgics: White boomers who went to the King Day march ‘cause it was just like the ‘60s, man.

* Movement Wannabes: A generation that doesn’t remember the ‘60s and feels like it was left out. (Like the young, long-haired white guy I saw at the King Day rally-eyes closed, swaying out of time to the music and clapping out of time to h is own swaying.)

* Business types: Of the people who want to move the flag, these are the only ones who actually worry about the boycott as an economic threat. More than that, they’re sick of their national and international contacts asking them what’s wrong with South Carolina.

*Atticus Finches: The classic, small-town, Southern-style liberal whose great aunts told them as children not to use the “n word” because it was “common,” but who later realized there were better reasons. They’ve been deeply ashamed of the flag for almost four decades.

*Gentle Christians: Have no feelings about the flag one way or the other, but believe we should move it because it is hurtful to our neighbors.

*No-nonsense types: Want to move the flag because it doesn’t make a bit of sense where it is.

*Big Dreamers: Want to move the flag for the sake of the big picture, because it is key to putting all sorts of pointless conflicts behind us and working together on other problems. Some of these are business types, some are politicians, some write for editorial pages.

78 *White Democrats: Very uncomfortable folks. Enough blacks in their districts to be elected as Democrats, enough whites to be elected as whites. These folks really want a resolution of the conflict.

*Black Democrats: Also want a resolution. Have chafed under the flag for years, but largely concentrated their scant political capital on other issues on which they thought they had a better chance, due to less resistance from the white majority.

*Scramblers: Mostly black politicians (often unelected) who aren’t at the table and badly want to be. Jealous of the attention the NAACP has garnered, they’re trying all sorts of stratagems to get a foot in the door, and some respect in the street.

*No Compromisers: You can find them on “both” sides of the issue. Some are idealists and purists about it; some see taking a hard line as being to their personal political advantage. All varieties in this group are making it hard to achieve consensus.

Not that “compromise” is what we necessarily need, in the sense of something that makes everybody equally unhappy. But what we do need is a solution that is just and fair and makes sense to the broad consensus of South Carolinians, no matter which of the many “sides” they may embrace.

Author: BRAD WARTHEN, Editorial Page Editor Section: EDITORIAL Page: D2

79 Works Cited

Argan, Gioulio Carlo. “Ideology and Iconology.” The Language of Images. Ed. W.J.T.

Mitchell. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1980. 15-24.

Arnheim, Rudolph. “Pictures, Symbols, and Signs.” Visual Rhetoric in a Digital

World. Ed. Carolyn Handa. New York: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2004. 137-150.

Askins, Allison. “Columbia Ready for King Day Rally.” The State 17 Jan. 2001: Front,

A1.

Askins, Allison and Chuck Carroll. “Flag Move Gets Caucus Support Black Legislators

Endorse Proposal.” 24 Dec. 1996: Front, A1.

Ayers, Edward. The Promise of the New South: Life after Reconstruction. New York:

Oxford University Press, 1992.

Ayers, Edward. What Caused the Civil War? Reflections on the South and Southern

History. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2005.

Barthes, Roland. “The Photographic Message.” Image—Music—Text. Trans. Stephen

Heath. New York: Hill, 1977. 15-31.

Barthes, Roland. “The Rhetoric of the Image.” Image—Music—Text. Trans. Stephen

Heath. New York: Hill, 1977. 32-51.

Beech, Jennifer. “Redneck and Hillbilly Discourse in the Writing Classroom:

Classifying Critical Pedagogies of Whiteness.” College English 67.2 (2004):

172-186.

Bell, Shireese M. “Group Files Confederate Attire Lawsuit.” Morning News 31 March

2006: Front, A1.

Berger, John. Ways of Seeing. London: Penguin Books, 1972.

Blair, J. Anthony. “The Rhetoric of Visual Arguments.” Defining Visual Rhetorics. Ed.

Charles A. Hill and Marguerite Helmers. New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum

80

Associates, 2004. 41-62.

Blight, David. Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory. Cambridge:

The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2001.

Boles, John B. “Foreword: Revisiting the Plain Folk of the South.” Samuel C. Hyde ix-

xix.

Bond, Bradley G. “Herders, Farmers, and Markets on the Inner Frontier: The

Mississippi Piney Woods, 1850-1860.” Samuel C. Hyde 73-99.

Samuel C Hyde. Jr. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1997. 73-99.

Brooks, Jeanne. “Actions of a Few Perpetuate Old South Stereotypes.” The State 18 May

2003: Metro, 1B.

Brown, Kathleen M. Good Wives, Nasty Wenches, and Anxious Patriarchs: Gender,

Race, and Power in Colonial Virginia. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina

Press, 1996.

Burke, Kenneth. A Rhetoric of Motives. New York: Prentice-Hall Inc., 1950.

Carlson, Dennis and Susan L. Schramm-Pate. “The Symbolic Curriculum: Reading the

Confederate Flag as a Southern Heritage Text.” Promises to Keep: Cultural

Studies, Democratic Education, and Public Life. Ed. Greg Dimitriadis and

Dennis Carlson. New York: RoutledgeFalmer, 2003.

Cash, W.J. The Mind of the South. New York: Vintage Books, 1991.

Chapman, Stephen. “The South’s Attachment to Offensive Symbols.” The New York

Times 13 Feb. 1997, North Sports Final: Commentary, 29.

Cobb, James C. Away Down South: A History of Southern Identity. Oxford: Oxford

University Press, 2005.

Coski, John M. The Confederate Battle Flag: America’s Most Embattled Emblem.

81 Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2005.

Dabbs, James McBride. Who Speaks for the South? New York: Funk & Wagnalls

Company, Inc. 1964.

Dodd, Bruce. “Been There.” Chicago Tribune 22 Oct. 1999, Chicago Sports Final:

Commentary, 27.

Ellison, Ralph. Invisible Man. New York: Random House, 1952.

Ford, Lacy K. “Popular Ideology of the Old South’s Plain Folk: The Limits of

Egalitarianism in a Slaveholding Society.” Samuel C. Hyde 205-227.

Frank, Melvin S. “Confederate Flag.” The State 10 Dec. 1996: Editorial, A10.

Glanton, Dahleen. “A Vivid Reminder-Across South, Rebel Flag Breeds Pride,

Contempt.” Chicago Tribune 7 Aug. 1999 Chicagoland Final: News, 1.

Hariman, Robert, and John Louis Lucaites. “Public Identity and Collective Memory in

U.S. Iconic Photography: The Image of ‘Accidental Napalm.’” Critical Studies

in Mass Communication 20 (2003): 35-66.

Helmers, Marguerite and Charles A. Hill. Introduction. Defining Visual Rhetorics. Ed.

Charles A. Hill and Marguerite Helmers. New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum

Associates, 2004. 1-23.

Hill, Charles A. “The Psychology of Rhetorical Images.” Defining Visual Rhetorics.

Ed. Charles A. Hill and Marguerite Helmers. New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum

Associates, 2004. 25-40.

Hoelscher, Steven. “Making Place, Making Race: Performances of Whiteness in the Jim

Crow South.” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 93.3 (2003):

657-686.

Hyde, Samuel C, ed. Plain Folk of the South Revisited. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State

82 University Press, 1997.

Hyde, Samuel C. “Introduction: Perspectives on the Common South.” Hyde 1-17.

Jarosz, Lucy and Victoria Lawson. “Sophisticated People Versus Rednecks: Economic

Restructuring and Class Difference in America’s West.” Antipode 34 (2003): 8-

27.

Monk, John. “A SC Friendship in Black and White.” The State 2 July 2000:

Front, A13.

Keith, Toby. White Trash with Money. Big Machine, 2006

Lester, Darnell Jr. “Flag.” The State 31 Dec. 1996: Editorial, A8.

Lindquist, Julie. A Place to Stand: Politics and Persuasion in a Working Class Bar.

Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002.

Mansfield, Brian. “Country is Cool with ‘Redneck.’” USA Today 28 Sept. 2005: 6.

McClam, Erin. “Rebel Flag Company Enjoying Banner Year.” The State 30 April 2000:

Front, A1.

McCurry, Stephanie. Masters of Small Worlds: Yeoman Households, Gender Relations,

and the Political Culture of the Antebellum South Carolina Low Country. New

York: Oxford University Press, 1995.

Miller, Nancy. “The Girl in the Photograph: The Vietnam War and the Making of

National Memory.” JAC 24.2 (2004): 261-290.

Mitchell, Margaret. Gone with the Wind. New York: McMillan, 1936.

Mitchell, W.J.T. Iconology: Image, Text, Ideology. Chicago: The University of Chicago

Press: 1986.

Odom, Alana. “Take it Down! NAACP Rally Speaks out against Battle Flag and

Beasley.” The State 11 Oct. 1998: Metro/Region, B1.

Prince, K. Michael. Rally ‘Round the Flag, Boys!: South Carolina and the 83 Confederate Flag Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2004.

Reed, John Shelton. “The Mind of the South and Southern Distinctiveness.” The Mind of

the South: Fifty Years Later. Ed. Charles W. Eagles. Jackson: University Press

of Mississippi, 1992.

Riddle, Lyn. “Flag Moved, Tempers Fly.” The Greenville News 2 July 2000, A Section:

1, 8A.

Roediger, David R. The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American

Working Class. London: Verso, 1991.

Shue, Alan. “Confederate Flag Enough’s Been Said about Rebel Banner.” 26 Feb. 2000:

Editorial, A11.

Sinclair, Claude. “Confederate Flag: Rebel Banner Wasn’t At All about Slavery.” The

State 6 Sept. 1999: Editorial, A10.

Surrat, Jared. “Businesses Speak Out about SC State Image.” The State 12 Sept. 1998,

Metro/Region: B1.

Trotter, comp. Bill 5156 Concurrent Resolution, May 31, 2000. South Carolina General

Assembly, session 1999-2000.

Twelve Southerners. I’ll Take My Stand: The South and the Agrarian Tradition. 1930.

Reprint, Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1982.

Warthen, Brad. “Both Sides? There Are Many, Many Sides on the Flag Issue.” The State

30 Jan. 2000: Editorial, D2.

Weaver, Richard. Visions of Order: The Cultural Crisis of Our Time. Baton Rouge,

Louisiana State University Press, 1964.

Weigman, Robyn. “The Anatomy of Lynching.” American Anatomies: Theorizing Race

and Gender. Durham: Duke University Press, 1995. 81-113.

84 Winders, Jamie. “White in All the Wrong Places: White Rural Poverty in the

Postbellum US South.” Cultural Geographies 10 (2003): 45-63.

Woodward, C. Vann. The Burden of Southern History. 3rd ed. Baton Rouge: Louisiana

State University Press, 1993.

Wright, Richard. Native Son. 1st ed. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1940.

85