Civil-war memorials: too big to veil
Jul 25th 2015 | COLUMBIA, SOUTH CAROLINA AND STONE MOUNTAIN, GEORGIA
... On a pine-scented summer evening, it is easy to see why Stone Mountain Park is Georgia’s leading tourist attraction. The biggest draw is its laser show, in which an eccentric hotchpotch of celebrities and luminaries are projected onto the mountainside. The three huge likenesses carved into the granite (Jackson, Jefferson Davis, the Confederate president, and Robert E. Lee, its most feted officer) haunt the display; but amid the zany images, mini-golf and ersatz geysers, visitors might forget that the whole place honours an armed rebellion intended to keep 4m people enslaved ...
Reconstituted on Stone Mountain in 1915, the Klan is now sinking towards oblivion; these days anyone can don a few Boy Scout-style badges and call himself a wizard. But reverence for the Confederacy is much broader. The Southern Poverty Law Centre, a think-tank, reckons over 100 pro-Confederate-flag rallies have been called since the Charleston atrocity. Many who do not march remain wedded to the version of civil-war history these symbols represent—in which the North was the aggressor, southern soldiers were chivalrous and secession was not, repeat not, motivated by a defence of slavery (which was anyway more paternalistic than cruel). “A large swathe of southern white opinion is reluctant to give up this form of mythology,” says Melton McLaurin of the University of North Carolina at Wilmington ...
The strongest response to that view is that Confederate tributes have always been intertwined with headline struggles over race, discrimination, victimhood and attitudes to the federal government. As David Blight of Yale University puts it, “Memory is always about the present.” This fusion has been especially visible at three points in history. Many Confederate memorials were erected in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, when the exculpatory version of civil-war history took hold in the South and when segregation was entrenched. The second point came in the 1960s, around the war’s centenary (most of the work on Stone Mountain was done then). That was the peak of the civil-rights movement, when hoisting Confederate flags and statues was a form of defiance to rampant liberalism outside the South.
The third such period may now be underway. Many bids to remove Confederate markers will be protracted: some states have laws designed to prevent such interference. Some of these were passed only recently: Tennessee’s dates from 2013. (Stone Mountain is protected by a Georgian law of 2001.) More are in the pipeline. Gerald Allen, a Republican state senator proposing a new heritage-protection bill in Alabama, says he wants to stop history being whitewashed so that its mistakes will not be repeated. Maybe so; but in the context of newly vocal black activism, all this looks like a contest that is as much about contemporary politics as ancient history ...
http://www.economist.com/news/united-states/21659726-flag-south-carolinas-statehouse-represented-beginning-not-end
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