So Governor Dean has gone and roiled the ranks with his comments regarding southern whites with confederate flags on their trucks. I have to admit that (having heard Gov. Dean repeat this same line since about May) I was somewhat surprised by its newfound currency. . .and the attendant controversy. In particular, both the Clark and Dean blogs were buzzing for hours on this one peccadillo.
I have a somewhat unique perspective on this. My take comes from two distinct life experiences--the first being my identity as a Southerner who has since migrated north, to New York City. But there are plenty of us up here, exiles of Dixie.
The second is a bit more unconventional. During my college years, I spent a semester witnessing the collapse of the Soviet Union from a ringside seat in Moscow. Everywhere people set to dismantling the regalia and symbols of the Soviet era, tearing down statues, selling of banners and the like for as much hard currency as they could get. It was a multinational fire sale of sorts.
Those two facets of my perspective inform my take on Dean's confederate flag remarks. As a southerner (a white southerner), I have always found that particular statement patently offensive. They are offensive because they are condescending. But not to blacks. Instead, they patronize the white southern population writ large, a fact that people on the weblogs aren't quite apprehending as of yet.
I lived in Louisiana, Mississippi, Georgia, and Tennessee for more than 20 years, including all of my childhood prior to high school. The notion that confederate flag-bearing, gun-toting truck drivers make up the better part of that population is nonsense--the kind only a carpetbagging yankee could conjure. That is why that phraseology will ultimately come back to haunt Dr. Dean. There is a New South, and it looks nothing like cotton plantations and tent revivals.
Another diarist here, Strategem, pointed out that the confederate flag was taken up as a symbol of some of the most virulent hate groups that populate our nation. That is correct, but that does not explain the original, hence the historical, import of that symbol to white southerners.
In his book "A Necessary Evil," Northwestern University historian and social critic Garry Wills discusses the intellectual history of anti-governmentalism in the United States. One of the most powerful elements of that history was the idea that secession of states was permitted by the Constitution.
The Dorr War and the Shays Rebellion, both of which preceded the Civil War, banked upon that interpretation. The chief historical problem was that Thomas Jefferson consistently believed in the right of secession, and James Madison actually aided and abetted Jefferson's fancy at a crucial moment in the drafting of the Constitution (a move Madison later came to regret). Wills concludes that Jefferson actually sowed the seeds of the Civil War. Not out of a love for slavekeeping (though Jefferson himself owned slaves), but out of a genuine belief that the prerogatives of the Union ought not be enforceable upon what he considered sovereign States.
I argue here that the chief causus belli was not slaveholding per se but rather the question of the right to secede. Only the leadership of Abraham Lincoln finally brought an end to this vital historical debate. It is worth noting that Lincoln did not emancipate the slaves as his first act; instead, that was nearly his last act in the Civil War. Ken Burns described it as an effort to "ennoble" an unpopular war. At that moment, citizens of northern cities were busy lynching black freemen and rioting against the draft.
I had mentioned the Soviet experience, so I ought to tie it in. As both a southerner and a student who witnessed the death of an empire, I have a gut bias against the manipulation of the historical record. Don't tear those symbols down. Let them stand there, while we work to persuade people to see them and say "never again." If we accomplish that transformation, it will be the white populations of southern states asking to discard the stars and bars. Until the lessons are learned, the monuments should stand as evidence. After all, racial equality is not the only fight that merits reflection on the lessons of the Civil War.
In that sense, I am with Gov. Dean, who at one point argued that the confederate flag was a states' rights issue. Those in the old Union states who would offer their opinions on this: Thank y'all, but we'll settle this on our own schedule.