BackStory; Contested Landscape: Confederate Symbols in America

This is backstory. I'm Peter Onuf. This past summer, the racially motivated shootings at a church in South Carolina revived a uniquely American debate. Why is the Confederate flag so polarizing? It represents my ancestors. Is it hate or is it Southern Heritage? The Confederate battle flag has long been the focus of controversy. When it was flown at a commemoration in 1890, it was the focus of fear. The African-American newspapers were so distressed at the meaning of the reappearance of the Confederate flag. Today, what to do with America's contested Confederate landscape statues, monuments to flag, and their future? I know we speak of not wanting to move or take down these symbols because they're history, but they were intended to make a mockery of history. Coming up on backstory, reckoning with Confederate memory, don't go away. Major funding for backstory is provided by an anonymous donor, the National Endowment for the Humanities,

the Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation, and the Arthur Vining Davis Foundations. From the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities, this is backstory, with the American History Guys. Welcome to the show. I'm Brian Ballot, and I'm here with Peter Onath. Hey, Brian. And there's us with us. Hi, Brian. We're going to start today's episode with the Confederate flag, but not the one you're picturing. It is an amazing variety of Confederate flags plural. This is John Kusky, author of the Confederate Battle Flag, America's Most Embattled Emblem, and historian at the American Civil War Museum in Richmond, Virginia. For full disclosure, I should mention here that I'm chair of the board of that museum. Anyway, I met John at the museum where it is true. There is an incredible array of Confederate flags. One thing about Confederate flags were people who study 1860s Confederate flags. There were lots and lots of them.

The story of the flag, or flags, began in 1861. That's when the Confederate Congress formed a committee to solicit designs for a national flag, one that could rally the South to its cause. Some fought for a design that was entirely new and distinctively southern, such as a palmetitry. But most Confederates referred to something that looked familiar. White sonneries of the Confederacy in 1861 still fought in themselves as Americans, as very much as citizens of the United States who helped to form the United States. They did not want to yield to the Yankees, the symbols of the United Nations. So they need to be weaned, if you will, from the symbols of the United States. The committee ended up picking a design that looked a lot like the United States flag. They showed me the design, 13 white stars on a blue canton in the upper left hand corner. Instead of 13 red and white stripes, however, there are just three.

Three big bars, red, white and red from top to bottom. One of the flags that was rejected was designed by South Carolina Congressman William Porsche Miles. His design eventually became the Confederate flag that we think up today. A red field across the blue stripes filled with white stars. Miles was furious with the committee's choice. Miles could not believe that his own nation, his own committee would choose that flag because it resembled the stars and stripes. In some words, told them you'll regret it and they did. It turns out that choosing a flag at wartime was a complicated business. Now, typically, national flags are also battle flags. Of course, a battle flag by definition was supposed to be something distinctive that allowed leaders on the field to maneuver their troops at NFI and distinguish for enemy. Imagine you're a soldier facing enemy fire. You can barely hear your orders over the gunfire. You can't see through the smoke.

But you do see flashes of color waving over the melee. Is that the flag of the enemy heading straight for you? It was a dramatic moment to see these flags. And of course, on the receiving end, it was scary as hell to see these units coming at you. In an effort to strike at the morale of the enemy, you fired to the crowd, hoping to hit the flag there. But then you realize that you fired on your own troops because your flag and your enemy's flag are so hard to tell apart. And when you have two flags, it looks so much like each other, especially in the smoke of battle, it defeated the purpose. Fortunately, individual divisions and armies designed and carried their own flags. There was the first Florida volunteer division, third Kentucky mounted, tenth Tennessee Irish infantry and on and on. Out of this profusion, William Porsche Miles' flag was chosen as the battle flag for the Army of Northern Virginia, Robert E. Lee's Army. The one that gave the South its most stunning victories and in the long run kept the South alive.

Lee's success made Miles' flag hugely popular throughout the Confederacy. The Confederate nation, the populace saw in that flag not only the sacrifices of the men who fought under it, but the hopes for actually winning this war and achieving Confederate independence. In 1863, the Confederate Congress incorporated the battle flag of the Army of Northern Virginia into the official flag of the Confederacy. At Miles' request, the tilted blue cross and red background were placed in the upper left-hand corner. The rest of the flag was white. Did no one point out that it looks like a flag of surrender at the time? Not at the time. It wasn't until late 1864 that the voices rose more loudly to point out that it looks like a flag of surrender, which of course was a little too close to the truth about that time as the Confederacy began to collapse. And it would be so nice for compromise today if we could say that flag was the flag of the soldier and not the flag of the nation.

That's exactly what the flags defenders say today that it stood for the soldier not for the Confederacy. Here's Jeff O'Kane, former head of the sons of Confederate veterans on NBC News last summer. It's a warm memorial to honor 25,000 men, a quarter of the men in South Carolina died to protect this state. But there's a lot more to the story. It meant so much to those men who fought in March under that emotional attachment that battle flags have. But because it wasn't blazing on the national flag, it also did stand for the Confederate nation. You cannot separate the two. There's no way around that. There is no clean break between the flag of the soldier and the flag of the nation. And that's not John Koski historian looking back. That is true because of the act of the Confederate leaders themselves. On July 17, 2015, a white man shot and killed nine people during a prayer meeting in a historic black church in Charleston, South Carolina.

It was a racially motivated shooting and photos of the assassin later circulated showing him holding the Confederate battle flag. What followed were months of mourning the victims and a heated debate over what it means to display the flag today. Why is the Confederate flag so polarizing? Is it hate or is it southern heritage? Many people were hung and lynched under that flag. It represents history to me. It represents my ancestors. As a symbol of our nation's racist past. Our ancestors were literally fighting to continue to keep human beings as slaves. That flag never had anything to do about slavery. Today on the show, we're going to explore what Confederate statues, monuments, and of course that famous flag mean to us today. By looking at their history and we'll discuss the tougher question of how they fit in America's future.

But first, let's take a look at how the Confederate battle flag took on new meanings after the Civil War. For some people, it is the history of the Confederate soldier on the battlefield. For others, it is the history of the dukes of hazard. For others, it's the history of a motorcycle that's trying to make a statement about his independence. And for others, very clearly, it's the experience of encountering that flag in the hands of people who meant to do them harm. John Koski says that all these meanings depend on which part of the flag's history you're talking about. One thing about the evolution of the Confederate flag over time is it's not a substitution of meanings. It's an accretion, an aggregation of meanings, one after another. So we're going to chart those many meanings through. Let's call it three acts in the flag's evolution. Act one, a sacred artifact of war. The move towards that is already beginning in 1890. This is art historian Mari McEnnis.

In the decades after the Civil War, flags that had been used in battles were either locked up in the war department, Washington, or controlled by heritage organizations, such as the daughters of the Confederacy. These flags were unfurled only for commemorative ceremonies, such as funerals, reenactments, and statute edications. On May 29th, 1890, thousands of people gathered in Richmond, Virginia to commemorate General Robert E. Lee with a towering bronze statue. That day, McEnnis says, The Confederate battle flag was on massive display. The city was overwhelmingly draped in the Confederate flag, Confederate music, Confederate uniforms. Northern journalists in attendance were shocked to see so many flags being waved so passionately. Many of them were writing about the flag of treason. They could not believe that the flag of treason was being almost worshiped as an idolatrous god. The event, which lasted a week, didn't escape the notice of African American journalists either.

And they too were so distressed at the reappearance of the Confederate flag. What was the meaning of this for them? Because at the time, in 1890, they were still feeling fairly hopeful about their political futures and their inclusion in the citizenship. Commemorations, such as this, troubled African Americans and northerners, but the flag was rarely displayed outside of such formal events. By the middle of the 20th century, however, the flag started appearing in other places. And as that image spread, heritage organizations lost control of its meaning. Which brings us to act too. College football. College students seem to be the best beginnings of proliferation. Specifically, college students at Kappa Alpha, a fraternity formed at Washington, Newly University in 1870. This was just after Robert E. Lee died.

The fraternity was founded as a heritage organization, and the flag was a symbol of Kappa Alpha pride. By the 1920s, Kappa Alpha was chapters around the south were using it in their college rituals. When Latter-day members of Kappa Alpha were drafted in World War II, they brought along the Confederate flag. And that's when they lost control over its meaning. Other soldiers adopted the flag as a symbol for all things white and southern. When southern soldiers returned from the war and went to college under the GI Bill, they brought the flag to one of peacetime's most contested grounds, the Gridiron. In 1947, Harvard's football team traveled south to play the University of Virginia. UVA fans waived the flag of southern pride with gusto, as was their tradition. But this time, things were different. Harvard had an African-American football player named Chester Pierce, a startle ball player.

Taking to the field, Pierce and his teammates looked up and saw a sea of Confederate battle flags and rowdy students. And very widely in the Northern press, it was assumed that this was some kind of gesture, if not a racist gesture, taunting of gesture Pierce with Confederate battle flags. The team worried about Pierce's safety and braced for racist threats. But according to Pierce, the game was pretty much like any other. And UVA stalwarts were very defensive in saying, no, this has been part of our football tradition in recent years. Koski says in the late 1940s, the flag's meaning was ambiguous. It was at a pivotal point in the flag's history, where it was anticipated a time in which the flag was at a more sinister meaning. Even if the UVA fans who used the flag did not mean it in the sinister way, others were beginning to do so. Which leads us to act three, desegregation. In 1948, the flag's more sinister meaning resurfaced.

When the Democratic Party included civil rights in its platform, some white southerners protested by forming the segregationist Dixie-Crat Party. The southern revolt against President Truman reaches its climax at Birmingham under the state rights banner. More than 6,000 flock to the Rump Convention to select a presidential tick. That first convention in Birmingham, Alabama was a wash and Confederate battle flag carried there by college students. So there was a direct pipeline, if you will, from colleges already accustomed to use of the battle flag as a football symbol, for example, and part of collegiate life to make it a very highly charged political symbol in the Dixie-Crat Party. Now the Ku Klux Klan had also adopted the flag. Today, it's a common refrain that the flag is only a racist symbol when it's in their hands. But Koski points out that if Klansmen were the only ones using the flag as a symbol of hatred, it would be easier to ignore. The trouble is, it wasn't just the Klan.

And almost every major and minor incident of the civil rights era, ordinary white southerners were using that flag to speak to their opposition to civil rights. At the same time, a Confederate flag fads swept the nation, making a pop culture symbol as well. But Confederate flag was everywhere. It wasn't in the black community, but as soon as you left the black community. That's historian Brenda Stevenson. She grew up in southeastern Virginia in the 1960s, as the country was struggling to integrate. And even when we integrated the schools, when we first came into contact with white children on a daily basis, Confederate flags were everywhere in their lockers. They would draw them on their notebooks, shirts, t-shirts that had them, et cetera, et cetera. And it was a great symbol, of course, of the Confederacy and also of a partite of the racial apartheid we had all been living in.

It's worth remembering that leaders of the Confederacy struggle to apply one meaning, the identity of the Confederate nation to many flags throughout the war. Today, Americans have a different challenge. What to do with this one flag that has so many meanings. Brenda Stevenson says that struggle is especially difficult because so many people are so invested in the flags many meanings. You know, there is a place for people whose ancestors were in the Confederacy for the Confederacy. There is a place for that history in US history. It's part of US history, but it has to be in conversation with the other heritages, even those that are oppositional and particularly those that are oppositional to that Confederate heritage. Brenda Stevenson is Professor of History at UCLA.

Also, helping us tell that story were John Koski, historian at the American Civil War Museum in Richmond, and Mari Meccanus, Professor of Art History at the University of Virginia. We just heard about the many meanings that Confederate battle flag has accrued in its history. A few years ago, public radio producer Logan Jaffe decided to find out just why that flag was so important to so many people. We asked Logan to introduce us to some of the folks she met along the way. For the project, my co-producer and I, we started in Atlanta. We visited Stone Mountain. We visited a guy in Kennesaw, Georgia, who owns a Civil War, home made Civil War Museum in the back. We talked to reenactors. We really wanted to gather and understand not only what it meant to people on a personal level, but the role that it has in America today.

I'm Captain of 42 men that will wear and raise a rifle and show that the South should have won. I was really intrigued by Clark Van Busker. I'm the captain of the 44th Georgia, which is a Confederate reenacting troop. There are people that come out here just to see the 44th Georgia. I know the camp is going to look like a camp should look. They know that when they see a presentation, it's going to be right. So Clark is kind of an interesting story because he was born a Yankee, and when he started reenacting, I think it was in his 40s. He started on the Union side, and he had this moment when he decided to switch sides. And since then, he's just been a die-hard Confederate. I enjoy the fighting part, and I kind of like that.

I'm their captain. Do I wish the South were the one? Oh my God, yes. So Clark takes reenacting very seriously, and he even says, you know, right when he steps onto the battlefield or right into camp, he is in that battle. He is like literally in his mind preparing for that battle, and that shows to everybody else. There are times in the hobby that I'm back in 1860, whatever it is. There are times that you're there. And I think for Clark, though, I think what the flag largely symbolizes is, I think that's how he feels connected to America. And, you know, he gets choked up, and he gets teary-eyed, and he talks about how... If I hear Dixie, and I see the flag, oh my God, you heard my voice go. I can't hide when I talk from my heart. I think he wanted to be a rebel. I think he still wants to be a rebel.

Virginia flaggers is a group of people who go out and kind of promote the pro Confederate flag waving cause. So they'll go out to, you know, a corner in Richmond, Virginia, for example, and they'll meet up on the weekends and just, you know, have a great time flying the Confederate flag altogether. I know what people think about when they see the battle flag, you know, all they think is KKK and we hate black people. So Karen Cooper is a black woman who's a member of the Virginia flaggers. So I know it's going to be something for people to see a black woman with the battle flag. Was I shocked to learn about this black woman waving a Confederate battle flag? Yeah, I think that's, and that's why I wanted to talk to her. I wanted to understand what she saw in it. I think it actually exemplifies so much what I was hoping to understand and learn about this project because Karen Cooper has a very long and kind of fascinating backstory. I grew up in New York. I was a member of the nation of Islam in New York. You know, the nation of Islam thinks, you know, races should be separate, you know, black and white and stuff like that.

And then I came down here and we were more together. I felt more welcomed in a cell. I mean, she talks about Northern racism and she talks about how when she moved to Virginia, you know, she was living in a more diverse community. I mean, people wave to me that I've never known. After talking to somebody like Karen Cooper and learning about where they came from and kind of the thing that they want the most, which is autonomy and a sense of independence, that's what she saw in that flag. And that transcended race to her. I actually think that it represents freedom. It represents a people who stood up to tyranny and by me being out there, I hope that you would see this is not racist. I mean, how can it be racist if I'm out there with them? I'm talking with them. I'm hugging them, you know, I'm conversing them.

These are my best friends that I'm out here with. I couldn't leave Richmond without talking to Goat Gatsby. So, Goat Gatsby is a white guy in his 20s who has Confederate ancestry, who shows up to protest the Virginia flaggers, you know, on a tricycle wearing a rhinestone studded hat. I was like, when if I just go there and just play Kanye West, conservative white people just hate Kanye West, like for no reason, they just feel like they have to. For the last couple of years, he's gone out to provide a sort of counter protest to the Virginia flaggers. And they'll go out there and he'll blast hip-hop with these signs that say, hip-hop is my heritage and not my flag. I see it as a symbol of both white power and white supremacy.

If they see the Confederacy as a shining moment of American history and really great, it just makes me wonder who they are as a person. Like, if that's what you think is the greatest moment, I think that's one of the most shameful moments in American history. I think Goat is a real testament to the way that people are able to take their own, you know, personal history and really kind of examining it with his own flair. Identity is a choice. Heritage is something that you're just told because you haven't lived it. It's someone else's experience. I feel like I got adopted by hip-hop. It's funny because when he shows up to the protest, there's an informal greeting and kind of a look of knowingness between him and whatever flaggers are out. They've seen each other almost every week for the last couple of years and they've grown to, you know, I wouldn't be surprised if they missed each other a little bit if one of them didn't show up. Because I don't want to hate the Virginia flaggers. I want them to say the Confederate flag is kind of an inappropriate thing and choose other things to honor the past.

I mean, why I decided to, you know, go the personal route is because it's for a couple of reasons, but one of the things I really wanted to understand the stories that people were telling themselves about how they felt about the flag. I wanted to understand a bit more nuance, you know, the way that you choose to understand your past, you're going to choose the narrative that best represents the way you feel about things today. Logan Jaffee is the co-producer of the ongoing multimedia documentary, Battleflap. We'll provide a link to that project on our website, backstoryradio.org. Richmond, Virginia's main thoroughfare is called Monument Avenue. The tree line boulevard is five miles long and lined with colorful ornate mansions.

And along the boulevard are these massive monumental sculptures and each of those monuments to a different Confederate hero. That's a story in Mari Mechanist who we heard from earlier in the show. She says the first monument went up in 1890. It was crafted in France and depicts General Robert E. Lee. It's towering. It's on an enormous monumental architectural base and then is a bronze equestrian sculpture on top of that. So it's my understanding that the whole city got in on the act when the statue finally arrived from France on a boat coming up to James River, right? And then was hauled to the location and in the kind of ironies that you can only find in the south mostly hauled by now freed African-American workers who are the major laborers in the city of Richmond. And the day of the unveiling was an enormous event in Richmond, the capital of the Confederacy, tens of thousands of former Confederate soldiers returned to the city, dressed in their uniforms.

There were parties and parades and speeches and events that consumed the city. Estimates were that more than 150,000 came to Richmond for the event. In the decades that followed, more monuments appeared on the boulevard. There were memorials to Confederate leaders Jeb Stewart and Jefferson Davis in 1907. Then Stonewall Jackson in 1919 and Naval Commander Matthew Fontaine Mori in 1929. McKenna says that every time a new Confederate monument went up, White Richlanders flooded the streets to celebrate. It's not just the presence of the work of art itself. It's the activities that took place around the work of art. And it's in those activities that the real meaning of the monuments were established. What else about those? Yeah, so these reunions that took place were martial reunions. These were military events. Former Confederate soldiers would dress up in uniform. The cavalry would be on horseback.

Bands would march in the front, playing the music of the Civil War. Flags were flying. The rolled officers showed up and gave them speeches. Exactly. And that sort of performance of southern white military strength both gave that meaning to those monuments, but also reminded African Americans in the city of Richmond of the power of the white majority. Defeated that would have been supposedly defeated, but I think is the years went on that defeat seemed less and less a reality. White senators may have lost the war, but many refused to admit that they had been wrong. And powerful white leaders put up the monuments, they also popularized the idea of the lost cause. And there are a few basic kind of tenants to the narrative that gets written to explain the defeat in the Civil War.

And one of the most important is that the Civil War was fought for states' rights, and that the men who fought were brave and gallant. And they were not defeated on the battlefield, but instead they were overwhelmed by the greater might and numbers and money of the Union Army. This lost cause narrative would hand in hand with the assertion of white supremacy in the South. Two years after the Civil War, the federal government began radical reconstruction in the South. Black men would vote, hold office, and help write new constitutions for their states. White senators fought against these changes in every way they could, and eventually reconstruction collapsed. Decades later, white southern state leaders rewrote those constitutions from reconstruction to strip the vote from African-Americans and to create an oppressive system of segregation. This is the political background, McIna says, for the construction of Richmond Civil War monuments.

I would argue that in many ways, though they are monuments to the Confederacy, they really tell us much more about the history of Jim Crow South, of the desire by white Richmonders to reassert their social and political superiority. They sit without irony. People must visit Richmond and say, um, don't they know they lost? You know when Robin Williams came, if you hear what he said, he drove down my name in Avenue and he said, I don't think I've ever seen quite so many second place trophies in my life. This is Michael Paul Williams, a columnist for the Richmond Times to spatch. Williams grew up in segregated Richmond and lived through the city's racial turmoil in the 1960s. He says that some of these tensions played out on Monument Avenue. There was actually a movement in the 1960s to expand Monument Avenue by seven additional Confederate monuments, if you can imagine that. Wow, it wasn't clear exactly who would be honored.

In fact, I think at least one Times dispatch or news leader editorial questioned, where will we get these seven additional folks? But just the idea that this was even in the late 1960s in the midst of the Civil Rights Movement, that this was of potential insult to the African American community did not seem to occur to anyone. I think this was a reaction to the Civil Rights Movement. This is sort of the white South playing offense. I could not dispel that because frankly that what happened on Monument Avenue was a reaction to the first reconstruction. So it stands the reason that, you know, there would be reaction after the Civil Rights Movement and the approval of the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act in this sense that something is slipping away. There was a Monument Avenue haven't changed in a century, except that a statue of African American tennis champion Arthur Ash was added in 1996. Last June, Williams wrote a column saying it was time to remove the Confederate statues of Monument Avenue.

I can no longer reconcile their outsized presence in the city of my birth, you wrote. That was written largely in my shock and my grief and the aftermath of what had happened in Charleston, South Carolina. It was kind of an aha moment. We can't, as a nation, way through the contradiction of a Confederate imagery in the public's beer and profess to be a freedom-loving nation. Williams thinks the Monuments belong in a museum. He would like to see new monuments of African American heroes such as abolitionist Frederick Douglass and net turner who let a failed rebellion of enslaved people. If you're going to tell the entire story of Monument Avenue and Confederacy and Virginia history, you've got to include those who fought for their freedom, the oppressed and enslaved who fought for their freedom. One man's lead of a bloody slave revolt is another man's freedom fighter and if we're going to value life, we've got to acknowledge that life is equal and we have to add balance to the story. And this self is much more than just the Confederacy.

This is historian Brenda Stephenson. We heard from her earlier in the show. When you look around in the South and you see the monuments and the highways and the schools and the namings that I'm saying of this, you wish you would think that from 1607 until, you know, 2015 that this was the Confederacy. Not just from 1861 to 1865. Stephenson says debates over Confederate monuments aren't just about the past. They're also about the present. And so within this context of African Americans feeling as if economically we are taking steps back within the criminal justice system that we are taking steps backwards. And so, you know, this debate about the Confederate monuments really comes within this really broader context. And those monuments are a manifestation of the symbolism that created the world we live in today. Monuments are no monuments. Williams thinks Richmond is ready to acknowledge its past.

We're changing as a community. We're changing as a nation. I mean, if you just look at the election of an African American president, if you look at the tremendous progress we've made in the establishment of LGBT rights, we live in times of dynamic change. And I think that frightens people. But there are other people who embrace it. Michael Paul Williams is a calmness for the Richmond Times dispatch. We also heard from historians Brenda Stephenson of UCLA and Mari McHenness of UVA. Over the last few weeks, we've been asking our listeners to tell us about the Confederate landscape around them and their homes. Here are some of those voices. My name is Meg Mulroney. I'm an associate professor of history here at James Madison University in Harrisonburg, Virginia. And my local landscape is my campus.

The whole campus, everything about it actually functioned as a kind of memorial to the Confederacy. I think a lot of people know that JMU was founded as the state normal and industrial school for women in 1908. The purpose was to train teachers who were going to train the next generation of children and what was, I think, incumbent upon the school as an institution was to pass along cultural values along with the subject matter. So the lost cause was kind of woven through every bit of the institutional identity. And I think it's interesting to look back on that early period of the campus history of think about the women's role, the women's students. They were very active participants in perpetuating the lost cause. My name is Stephen Stetson and I live in Montgomery, Alabama. And we had an interesting experience related to the Confederacy recently when we drove about 30 minutes from Montgomery to the Confederate Memorial Park, which is about a hundred acre site that was the home of Alabama's only retirement home for Confederate war veterans.

We went expecting sort of a sprawling complex of homes and a hospital and a sort of number of buildings and it turns out that it's really just kind of an empty field because when they closed the facility in the late 1930s, they ended up tearing down all of the buildings. Although there is a museum there in two cemeteries, it's just a beautiful tranquil field. My name is Rob Collins. I'm from Birmingham, Alabama and I grew up in Georgia and we used to drive down US 19 to my grandparents house. We passed a little town called Butler and I've seen a lot of Confederate monuments, but the one in Butler was kind of strikingly not because of its form.

It had the usual obelisk with a Confederate holder standing on top that there was a little berth on the side that stuck out and then I haven't seen anywhere else. It said, no nation rose so pure and fair or fell so free from crime. Even at the time as a teenager who was really besotted with the Confederacy Meal of South, I really thought those words sounded like special pleading. Those were listeners, Meg Mulroney, Stephen Stetson and Rob Collins. So far in this hour, we've explored some of those physical relics. But in the early 20th century, the narrative of the lost cause found its way into a new medium, the silver screen.

You get just a wave of pro Confederate films to such an extent that it seems as if it's impossible to sell a pro union pro emancipation film in the United States. This is film critic Eileen Jones. She says two early directors proved incredibly influential. Thomas Inns and D. W. Griffith. Of course, directed the infamous Birth of a Nation in 1915. And they're both very much into pro Confederate films. Griffith, obviously being the more famous one. And he really was the son of a war hero very much, you know, into the whole idea of the nobility of the southern aristocracy especially. And they were tremendously influential. They made big hit films and that also helps way the direction was going. Griffith and Inns came along at just the right moment. In the early 1900s, northern and southern whites were ready to reconcile.

And movie studios quickly realized that most white southerners wouldn't buy tickets for early pro-North films like Uncle Tom's Cabin. But Birth of a Nation's plot played to a national audience. There's a northern family and a southern family, obviously both white. And in the end, you're going to represent the reconciliation of the white north and south by a marriage of, you know, one member of each family at the end. And they are going to ride in front of the triumphant Ku Klux Klan through the streets of the beleaguered south. And that influence carries on very, very strongly into the 20s. But there are some differences, some changes that the Hollywood studios wanted to make. Even though it was so successful, it was also contentious. There were very strong protests. There were requests on the part of the NAACP to pull the film. Basically, the Hollywood studios agreed they'd rather tamp down controversy and play it safe. So even though there would still be a romanticization of the south and films would be very sympathetic to the southern cause and the southern point of view.

They tended to try to get rid of such elements as direct references, for example, to the Ku Klux Klan. Quelling as much as possible, what was referred to often as the Negro question or the Negro problem. Joneses Hollywood solved this problem by going west. So many elements of the romantic south fit so nicely into the western genre. Some of John Wayne's most famous roles, from Ethan Edwards and the searchers, to Rooster Cogburn and True Grit, were men who'd moved west after fighting for the south. The same goes for Clint Eastwood, who played an ex-confederate in the outlaw Josie Wales. You'll be 10 bears? I am 10 bears. I'm Josie Wales. I have heard. You're the grey rider. You would not make peace with the blue coats. You may go in peace. It's one reason that we have all these, in essence, pro-confederate films, the fact that America loves an underdog.

Yes. The south is the underdog. They're the Americans who suffered the only cruel defeat in war, you know, until Vietnam. Yes, and that whole, and, of course, it pairs so beautifully with that kind of rebel yell, refusal to be defeated, that just plays beautifully in film. It really does. Whereas, of course, the Yankees get very much associated, and this isn't entirely unfairly, with, you know, the dollar-loving industrializing. Imperialists. Another explanation has been given that's quite interesting. It's the idea that, at a certain point, as you're moving into the late 1800s, and the process of industrialization is making a huge majority of the population really long for a kind of romantic idea of the old agrarian world. And we're better, we're better to find it than the south. We're better.

That's exactly what it is. So gone with the wind is a trip opens with a tribute to the lost world of the agrarian south, strongly featuring, of course, happy slaves coming home, singing from their labor. Joan says this mindset is even apparent in recent films. Sure, some celebrate the union cause, such as Glory and Lincoln, but Joan says Hollywood still has a fondness for Confederate heroes and heroines. Take 1999's Ride with the Devil, or better yet, the 2003 Oscar winner Cold Mountain. That's the romantic story of a Confederate soldier struggling to get back to his one true love. Now they come back, you know that? In a nation at war, an ordinary man is about to become an extraordinary hero. Joan argues that these modern films show that a century after Birth of a Nation, the lost cause is still a box office draw. Movies celebrating Yankees seem risky in comparison, because stories with Confederate heroes have done so well for so long.

The scary thing about getting anything set in stone as far as pop culture conventions is it's very, very difficult to reverse them. It looks like a huge gamble to go against what the whole tide of films, novels, whatever has been. For a long time, that obviously held real sway with movie studios. Can you sell it in the South? The plate of Lena Horne's musical numbers. They always had to be by herself leaning on a lamppost so they could quickly cut it out before they sold a musical to Southern audiences. Well, I really enjoyed going to the movies with you. We've got to do this again soon. Thanks for joining us on backstory. Thank you. Eileen Jones teaches film history at the University of California, Berkeley. We're going to end the show today with a perspective that hasn't been heard much in recent debates about the subject.

Someone who changed his mind. Waverly Ag Cox's love of Civil War history dates back to the fifth grade. That was when his teacher pointed out that in 1862, Stonewall Jackson's army marched down the very street where he lived. I could imagine seeing their soldiers walking down our road with the dust flying in the muskets gleaming in the sunlight. And at that moment, I was absolutely hooked. As an adult, Ag Cox spent more than a decade living out that history as Confederate reenactor. He loved everything about it. The drill setting up camp in the camaraderie. He even locked the hard tack. All that made him feel a powerful connection to his ancestors who'd fought for the Confederacy. Well, I'd say we were we were definitely fighting for home and hearth and for our state's rights, you know, protecting ourselves from from that Yankee Horde that was coming, you know, that Lincoln had sent down. We didn't feel it was right for him to try to tell one state how to how they should live.

So to what extent did you consider slavery to be a cause of the war? I always felt that yeah, slavery was one of the causes of the war, you know. But you really want to wash it over. You just want to cover that up. You know, you know, it's there. But man, you just don't want to bring that up because you know, it's sensitive to a lot of people. But in 2013, Ag Cox started having second thoughts. It was during the anniversary of the Battle of Gettysburg. We had a reporter embedded with us at the 150th anniversary, which was a mega event. I think about the 11 or 12,000 reactors and discussion started turning towards how do you feel about slavery and how you think your ancestors would have thought about it. And I started thinking about my perceptions of the war and where I was I really being accurate or was I really being honest with myself about why I portrayed a Confederate soldier. And it started putting a few seeds of doubt in my head.

Right, right. And then last year about this time, I discovered doing a little family research. I found out that one of my ancestors founded Augusta County, John Lewis. Wow. And then I found out that his son Thomas, who was my seventh grandfather, petitioned the court to have one of his slaves castrated. Oh, wow. And that had a huge, huge effect on me. And I started saying that this became very real. And that was kind of another eye-opener for me. It's okay to love the South. But how do you celebrate the Confederate soldier and still deal with the sins of slavery? It's a complex thing. I love the South. I love my ancestry. It's always been something that's been beat into my head since I was a child is that, you know, you revere these men and women that brought you to this place. But I can't condone for their action sometimes like Thomas Lewis.

I can't condone that. That's it. But I also realize that's a sin that he has to deal with. But you know, a lot of your compatriots would have said, I can tell you exactly how I live with that. It's heritage not hate. I disagree. I think it's a heritage of hate. And my witness test for people who say heritage not hate is, well, who was your ancestor and wouldn't you need to fight with? I would say the vast majority of them cannot answer that question. And then I said, then that's not a part of your heritage. Then I tried to explain to them that the whole reason this war was fought was so whether you call it states rights was for the right of people to own slave. It's that the states could determine how they controlled other people's lives. So it's the not hate part. Yeah. Do you doubt that that's sincere? I don't think it's sincere. I'm sure they love their heritage and I can't disparage them that. But I think people are misguided when they say it's not hate.

There's a lot of people out there who believe that the blacks are at fault for how the war ended. How was that? Well, because you're a poor southern man. You fought for four years. You come back. Everything you've known has been changed, taken from you. And now you have to share trying to compete with a freed black man. And so there has to be some animosity there. There has to be some hatred. So when she sort of started down this road, it sounded like it kind of snowballed a little bit. It did. It did. Every year at Memorial Day, we always did a Confederate Memorial at the cemetery in Stanton. So for the last 13 years, I've always been asked to be a speaker. When I was speaking to the audience about the Confederate battle flag, you know, I had to mention the fact that there's much more to the South than just the Confederate battle flag that we have a great culture of literature, of food and music and, of course, whiskey.

That, to me, is much more important than basing your southerness on a piece of fabric. A few people in the crowd walked out, but most were polite. Add cock also wrote an op-ed in his local newspaper. We cannot pick our history, he said. We must embrace the entire story of our past. And then three days later, we had the shootings in South Carolina. Then everything seemed to erupt. There was just so much vitriol and hatred being thrown back and forth. And I felt that I needed to make a statement about that. So using Facebook, I made my comment about how I felt the flag should be treated. And that's when things really got kind of hot. What sort of things do people say? Well, there were some threats. But there were, for the most part, people just kept telling me, you know, how wrong I was. Because I said, I felt it was appropriate to take the Confederate flag down in South Carolina.

They interpreted that, is that I wanted to take every flag down. That I felt that the flag no longer had a place. So why do you think that the flag has become the symbol to both sides that so no compromise on the flag? There's other stuff that, you know, that's the Civil War, but the flag. Well, why is that? Southerners play so much power in symbolism. And I think that flag was very important to the soldiers. You know, because that was the designation for their unit, I think. Yes, literally what they rallied around on a battlefield. Exactly. They rallied to that flag. But it should only feel important to those soldiers. Why have we embraced it? That today that people are willing to cause physical violence on other people because of that flag. That they have no connection to aside from that they're great, great, great grandfather. And as we've seen, the Confederate battle flag has spread to lots of places where it's very unlikely that somebody's great, great grandfather carried it. Exactly.

So what is this meant for your reenacting? It means I have retired from reenacting. I've taken something that I've loved and done for 13 years and had to walk away from it completely. That's got to come a sense of loss, right? It is a huge sense of loss. It means walking away from a lot of friends and walking away from a lot of weekend spent in camaraderie with these people. So you originally got into reenacting because you felt a connection with your ancestors. Do you feel less of a connection with them now that you've made this break? No, I still feel a strong connection to my ancestors. I think we as human beings make a lot of mistakes. We do things that we regret. But I think sometimes we learn and we grow from these things. And I think my ancestors are just like me. I'm sure maybe they had these subiphanies at some point. Maybe something they didn't. That they could look around, they could see the reality too. I think so.

I think they would probably be more proud of me for standing up for my convictions than to just go along with the crowd. Waverly Ed Koch is a former Confederate reenactor from Whitehall, Virginia. Ed Peter, I'll bet his relatives would be proud of him. And proud of one particular phrase. He's trying to capture the entire story of our past. The kind of story that a flag can't capture. So how do we capture that story yet also capture the raw emotion, the heat of battle and the rallying around the flag? Brandon, it's very nicely put. I think the flag is such a galvanizing symbol. It reminds us of moments when life and death hung in the balance. Either or.

Yeah. And that's very powerful. It continues to be powerful. But reduces our ancestors. It reduces those men to the moment that so many of them died. But I think we need to engage more and I think Waverly shows the way. You know, this show is kind of strange for me. It's pretty close to what I think about all the time when I'm not back story. And I'm wrestling with the same sort of issues that Waverly Ed Koch is wrestling with. What does it mean if you're a southerner and you want to try to embrace the whole history? And all the people who have lived here and try to find a commonality rather than something that divides you. And I think all the voices that we heard today maybe open some doors for that conversation. Maybe the crisis we've been going through after Charleston is a necessary crisis. It gets us talking to each other about things that a lot of times we'd rather not talk about. I'm like a soldier getting over the war. I'm like a young man getting over his crazy days.

I don't have to do that anymore. I'm like a soldier getting over the war. That's going to do it for today. But the conversation doesn't stop here. Join us online to tell us what you thought about the show and to help us shape our upcoming episodes. We have one on the history of American foreign religions. You'll find us at backstoryradio.org or send us an email to backstory at Virginia.edu. We're also on Facebook, Tumblr, and Twitter at backstoryradio. Whatever you do, don't be a stranger. Backstories produced by Andrew Parsons, Bridget McArthur, Nina Ernest, Kelly Jones, and Emily Gatton. Jamal Milner is our engineer. Julianna Dirty is our digital editor. And Melissa Gismondi helps with it research. Special thanks this week to the Museum of the Confederacy and Jesse Dukes. Our executive producer is Andrew Wendell.

Backstories produced at the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities. Major support is provided by anonymous donor, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation, and the Arthur Vining Davis Foundation. Additional funding is provided by the Tomato Fund, called Vedic Fresh Ideas and the Arts, the Humanities, and the Environment. And by History Channel, History made it every day. I'm like a soldier getting over the war. Brian Ballot is professor of history at the University of Virginia. Peter Oneth is professor of history emeritus at UVA and senior research fellow at Monticello. At heirs is professor of the Humanities and president emeritus at the University of Richmond. Backstories was created by Andrew Wendell for the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities. Backstories is distributed by PRX, the public radio exchange.