UNITED STATES: Is the Confederacy Making a Comeback?

By Farhan Haq Reprint | | Print |

NEW YORK, Oct 10 1996 (IPS) - The Confederate States of America (CSA) is making a comeback in the southern United States — 131 years after it was defeated by the Union forces in a bloody, five-year civil war.

The Confederate flag — which is also incorporated into state flag of Georgia — flew Atlanta’s Olympic Games in July, while one of the state’s college football teams, Georgia Tech, takes the field to the strains of the Confederate anthem. A woman reputed to be the last living Confederate widow received a standing ovation recently in Alabama’s state assembly.

More important, a “Southern heritage” history movement, which presents a generally favourable view of the short-lived, pro- slavery Confederacy, has attracted many top right-wing U.S. politicians, from former Republican presidential candidate Pat Buchanan to several ranking Southern senators.

The list of contributors to the ‘Southern Partisan’ magazine — whose articles include tributes to the “Boy Heroes of the Confederacy” and Confederate Army chief Gen. Robert E. Lee — is almost identical to one of the leaders of the Southern right.

Buchanan, Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott, a Mississippi Republican, Senators Phil Gramm of Texas and Jesse Helms of North Carolina and anti-abortion activist Phyllis Schlafley are among the magazine’s contributors.

Buchanan and Lott are also columnists for the ‘Citizen Informer’, which advertises itself as a magazine built on “WHITE PRIDE…with hard work.” In 1994, the Informer conducted a poll on the question of whether Confederate flags, symbols and statues should be removed; 97 percent of its readership said no.

The neo-Confederates “trace what they see as the ills of modern society to (the Confederacy’s) defeat, and pose the resurrection of the Confederacy as a solution,” argues Emil Greenhalgh Prague in a recent issue of ‘Turning the Tide,’ an anti- racist journal. Prague says they oppose many federal government initiatives, from civil rights and women’s rights to taxes and welfare.

Organisations that monitor Southern hate groups, like the Ku Klux Klan (KKK), concede that the Southern heritage groups may be offensive, particularly to African Americans worried that the groups are committed more to white supremacy than to preserving history. But these groups do not pose any threat of violence or secession, they add.

“We monitor several Southern heritage groups, and we don’t consider them a menace,” says Tawanda Shaw of KlanWatch, a branch of the Southern Poverty Law Centre which monitors hate groups. “They don’t advocate insurrection — it’s just basically history lessons.”

“A lot of these groups are just reaching back to the time of the Confederacy, to what they deem to be patriotic times,” agrees Noah Chandler, director of the Georgia-based Centre for Democratic Renewal. “They use imagery and an apparent love for that time to define what is wrong today.”

“There is not a serious secessionist movement in the South,” according to Chandler. But he worries nonetheless that the heritage groups contribute to a divisive rhetoric about “states’ rights” — the same doctrine that rallied Southerners both before the Civil War and again in 1950s and 1960s during the civil rights movement.

Many of the heritage groups, he notes, are adamantly opposed to the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution which guarantees equal treatment for all races and creeds under the law. The Amendment was also used by the Supreme Court in watershed civil rights cases in which it declared segregation unconstitutional because of its roots in slavery.

“School segregation is still a really big topic, on which they express overt racism,” Chandler argues of the Southern heritage groups’ ideas.

Some groups — including the Southern League, which is actually based in a northern state, Illinois — go further by professing admiration for secessionist movements in other countries, including Italy’s Northern League.

The Southern League’s publication, ‘Chronicles,’ recently published an article by Thomas Fleming, a former ‘Southern Partisan’ editor, which extolled the Northern League’s bid for a breakaway Padanian Republic.

“There are only two alternatives for this continental empire that has never been a real nation,” Fleming wrote in ‘Lessons from Lombardia’. “Either we find the means to decentralise decision-making and restore authority to the old institutions of family and town and country (and even state), or else we lapse into a multi-faceted civil war of blacks against Hispanics against whites against blacks against Jews.”

Such talk is more intellectual debate than a plea for insurrection, Shaw contends.

“Groups like the Southern League — really a group of professors and intellectuals — advocate Southern history and culture,” Shaw says. She does not see them as contributing to more radical and violent movements, like the KKK or the militias.

The Confederacy’s defeat in 1865 notwithstanding, Southerners enjoy a great deal of power in the U.S. federal government. President Bill Clinton (of Arkansas) and Vice President Al Gore (of Tennessee) are both from the South, as are House Speaker Newt Gingrich (of Georgia) and Senate leader Lott.

Both the Democratic and Republican parties have tried to appeal more to Southern white voters in recent years by pushing policies — such as ending federal welfare benefits — that give more power to state governments.

The Southern heritage movement, despite its rhetoric, is not “inherently Confederate,” Chandler says. “But they are reaching into that bag of tricks.”