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General News    H2'ed 7/7/15

Tomgram: Greg Grandin, How Endless War Helps Old Dixie Stay New

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Southern ports like New Orleans, Charleston, and Tampa were used as staging areas for the invasions of Cuba and Puerto Rico. Northern soldiers passing through New Orleans were glad to see that "grizzled old Confederates" were cheering them on, saluting the Union flag, and happy to send their sons "to fight and die under it." Newspapers throughout the South, along with Dixie's largest veterans association, the United Confederate Veterans, saw war with Spain as a vindication of the "Old Cause" and reveled in the exploits of former Confederate generals, including Robert E. Lee's nephew, Fitzhugh Lee.

In June 1898, just weeks after U.S. troops landed in Cuba, two train-car loads of Confederate flags arrived in Atlanta for a coming reunion of southern veterans of the war. The Stars and Bars would soon festoon the city Union General William T. Sherman had burned to the ground. At the very center of the celebration's main venue stood a 30-foot Confederate flag, flanked by a Cuban and a U.S. flag. Speech after speech extolled "sublime" war -- not just the Civil War but all the wars that made up the nineteenth century -- with Mexico, against Native Americans, and now versus Spain. "The gallantry and heroism of your sons as they teach the haughty Spaniard amid the carnage of Santiago to honor and respect the flag of our country, which shall float forever over an 'indissoluble union of indestructible states,'" was how one southern veteran put it.

War with Spain allowed "our boys" to once more be "wrapped in the folds of the American flag," said General John Gordon, commander of the United Confederate Veterans, in remarks opening the proceedings. Their heroism, he added, has led "to the complete and permanent obliteration of all sectional distrusts and to the establishment of the too long delayed brotherhood and unity of the American people." In this sense, the War of 1898 was alchemic, transforming the "lost cause" of the Confederacy (that is, the preservation of slavery) into a crusade for world freedom. The South, Gordon said, was helping to bring "the light of American civilization and the boon of Republican liberty to the oppressed islands of both oceans."

With Spain defeated, President William McKinley took a victory tour of the South, hailing the "the valor and the heroism [that] the men from the south and the men of the north have within the past three years... shown in Cuba, in Puerto Rico, in the Philippines, and in China."

"When we are all on one side," the president said, "we are unconquerable." It was around this time that, after much delay, Congress finally authorized the return of Confederate flags captured by Union forces during the Civil War to the United Confederate Veterans.

To Serve Mankind

World War I brought more goodwill. In June 1916, as Woodrow Wilson began to push through Congress a remarkable set of laws militarizing the country, including the expansion of the Army and National Guard (and an authorization to place the former under federal authority), the construction of nitrate plants for munitions production, and the funding of military research and development, Confederate veterans descended on Washington, D.C., to show their support for the coming war in Europe.

"About 10,000 men wearing the gray, escorted by several thousand who wore the blue, marched along Pennsylvania Avenue and were reviewed by the President," one observer reported. "In the line were many young soldiers now serving in the regular army, grandsons of those who fought for the Confederacy and of those who fought for the Union. The Stars and Bars of the Confederacy were proudly borne at the head of the procession... As the long line passed the reviewing stand the old men in gray offered their services in the present war. 'We will go to France or anywhere you want to send us!' they shouted to the president."

Wilson won reelection in 1916, his campaign running on the slogan, "He kept us out of war." But he could then betray his anti-war supporters knowing that a rising political coalition -- made up, in part, of men looking to redeem a lost war by finding new wars to fight -- had his back.

Decades before President Richard Nixon bet his reelection on winning the Dixiecrat vote, Wilson worked out his own Southern Strategy. Even as he was moving the nation to war, Wilson re-segregated Washington and purged African Americans from federal jobs. And it was Wilson who started the presidential tradition of laying a Memorial Day wreath at Arlington Cemetery's Confederate War Memorial.

In 1916, he turned that event into a war rally. "America is roused," Wilson said to a large gathering of Confederate veterans, "roused to a self-consciousness she has not had in a generation. And this spirit is going out conquering and to conquer until, it may be, in the Providence of God, a new light is lifted up in America which shall throw the rays of liberty and justice far abroad upon every sea, and even upon the lands which now wallow in darkness and refuse to see the light."

What alchemy it was -- with Wilson conscripting the Confederate cause into his brand of arrogant, martial universalism. The conflict in Europe, Wilson said at the same wreath-laying event a year later (less then two months after the U.S. had declared war on Germany), offered a chance "to vindicate the things which we have professed" and to "show the world" that America "was born to serve mankind."

American history was fast turning into an endless parade of war, and the sectional reconciliation that went with it meant that throughout the first half of the twentieth century the "conquered banner" could fly pretty much anywhere with little other than positive comment. In World War II, for instance, after a two-month battle for the island of Okinawa, the first flag Marines raised upon taking the headquarters of the Japanese Imperial Army was the Confederate one. It had been carried into battle in the helmet of a captain from South Carolina.

With the Korean War, the NAACP's journal, The Crisis, reported a staggering jump in sales of Confederate flags from 40,000 in 1949 to 1,600,000 in 1950. Much of the demand, it reported, was coming from soldiers overseas in Germany and Korea. The Crisis hoped for the best, writing that the banner's growing popularity had nothing to do with rising "reactionary Dixiecratism." It was a "fad," the magazine claimed, "like carrying foxtails on cars."

As it happened, it wasn't. As the Civil Rights Movement evolved and the Black Power movement emerged, as Korea gave way to Vietnam, the Confederate flag returned to its original meaning: the bunting of resentful white supremacy. Dixie found itself in Danang.

Dixie in Danang

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Tom Engelhardt, who runs the Nation Institute's Tomdispatch.com ("a regular antidote to the mainstream media"), is the co-founder of the American Empire Project and, most recently, the author of Mission Unaccomplished: Tomdispatch (more...)
 

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