The Confederate Flag at War (But Not the Civil War)
by
Greg Grandin
In this 1967 press photo by Toshio Sakai, U.S. soldiers in Vietnam ride a
tank displaying a Confederate flag. (Photo: manhhai/flickr/cc)
The Pentagon just cant let go. In the wake of the Charleston Massacre,
Amazon and Walmart have announced that they will no longer sell Confederate
flag merchandise. Ebay says it will stop offering Confederate items for
electronic auction. The Republican governor of Mississippi calls his state
flag, which includes the Stars and Bars in the top left corner, a point of
offense that needs to be removed. Even Kentuckys Mitch McConnell, the
majority leader of the U.S. Senate, agrees that a statue of Confederate
President Jefferson Davis in his state's capitol building belongs in a
museum.
Yet the Department of Defense says it isnt even reviewing the possibility
of a ban on the flag, deciding instead to leave any such move to the various
service branches, while military bases named after Confederate officers will
remain so. One factor in this decision: the South provides more than 40% of
all military recruits, many of them white; only 15% are from the Northeast.
Filling the ranks isn't, however, the only reason for the militarys refusal
to act.
Over the last few weeks, there has been near unanimous agreement among
liberal and mainstream commentators that the Confederate flag represents
hate, not heritage. The flags current presence in American culture is
ubiquitous. It adorns license plates, bumper stickers, mugs, bodies (via
tattoos), and even baby diapers. The flags popularity is normally traced
back to the post-World War II reaction of the Dixiecrat South to the Civil
Rights Movement. South Carolina, for instance, raised the Stars and Bars
over its state house in 1961 as part, columnist Eugene Robinson said on
"Meet the Press," of its massive resistance to racial desegregation."
All true. But like many discussions of American conservativism, this account
misses the role endless war played in sustaining domestic racism. Starting
around 1898, well before it became an icon of redneck backlash, the
Confederate Battle Flag served for half a century as an important pennant in
the expanding American empire and a symbol of national unification, not
polarization.
It was a reconciled Army that moved out into the world after the Civil War,
an unstoppable combination of Northern law (bureaucratic command and
control, industrial might, and technology) and Southern spirit (an
exaltation of military ideals and virtues, including valor, duty, and
honor). Both law and spirit had their dark sides leading to horrors
committed due either to the very nature of the American empire -- the
genocide of Native Americans, for example, or the war in Southeast Asia --
or to the particular passions of some of its soldiers. And both law and
spirit had their own flags.
Lost Cause Found
Northerners and Southerners agreed on little in the years after the Civil
War, historians Boyd Cothran and Ari Kelman write, except that the Army
should pacify Western tribes. Reconstruction -- Washingtons effort to set
the terms for the Souths readmission to the Union and establish postwar
political equality -- was being bitterly opposed by defeated white
separatists. According to Cothran and Kelman, however, Many Americans found
rare common ground on the subject of Manifest Destiny.
After the surrender at Appomattox, it was too soon to fly the Stars and Bars
against Native Americans. And it was Union officers -- men like generals
George Armstrong Custer and Philip Sheridan -- who committed most of the
atrocities against indigenous peoples. But Confederate veterans and their
sons used the pacification of the West as a readmission program into the
U.S. Army. The career of Luther Hare, a Texas son of a Confederate captain,
is illustrative. He barely survived Custers campaign against the Sioux.
Cornered in a skirmish that preceded Little Big Horn, Hare opened fire and
let out a rebel yell before escaping. He then went on to fight Native
Americans in Montana, Texas, the Pacific Northwest, and Arizona, where he
put down the last of the renegade Apaches, before being sent to the
Philippines as a colonel. There, he led a detachment of Texans against the
Spanish.
With Reconstruction over and Jim Crow segregation installed in every
southern State, the Spanish-American War of 1898, in which the U.S. took
Cuba and Puerto Rico in the Caribbean and the Philippines and Guam in the
Pacific, was a key moment in the rehabilitation of the Confederacy. Earlier,
when slavery was still a going concern, southerners had yearned to separate
Cuba from Spain and turn it into a slave state. Now, conquering the island
served a different purpose: a chance to prove their patriotism and reconcile
with the North.
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. Lees 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 celebrations 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 Cemeterys
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 NAACPs 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 banners
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 wasnt. 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
We are fighting and dying in a war that is not very popular in the first
place, Lieutenant Eddie Kitchen, a 33-year-old African-American stationed
in Vietnam, wrote his mother in Chicago in late February 1968, and we still
have some people who are still fighting the Civil War. Kitchen, who had
been in the military since 1955, reported a rapid proliferation of
Confederate flags, mounted on jeeps and flying over some bases. The Negroes
here are afraid and cannot do anything, Kitchen added. Two weeks later he
was dead, officially listed as killed in action. His mother believed that
he had been murdered by white soldiers in retaliation for objecting to the
flag.
Kitchens was one of many such complaints, as the polarization tearing
through domestic politics in the United States, along with the symbols of
White Supremacy -- not just the Confederate flag but the burning cross, the
Klan robe and hood, and racist slurs -- spilled into Vietnam. As early as
Christmas Day 1965, a number of white soldiers paraded in front of the
audience of conservative comedian Bob Hopes USO show at Bien Hoa Air Base.
After they were seated, wrote an African-American soldier protesting the
display, several officers and NCOs [non-commissioned officers] were seen
posing and taking pictures under the flag. I felt like an outsider. An
African-American newspaper, the Chicago Defender, reported that southern
Whites were infecting Vietnamese with their racism. The Confederate flags
seem more popular in Vietnam than the flags of several countries, the paper
wrote, judging by the display of flags for sale on a Saigon street corner.
Black soldiers who pushed back against such Dixie-ism were subject to insult
and abuse. Some were thrown in the stockade. When Private First Class Danny
Frazier complained of the damn flag flown by Alabama soldiers in his
barracks to his superior officers, he was ordered to do demeaning work and
then demoted.
Martin Luther King, Jr., was assassinated in early April 1968 and American
military bases throughout South Vietnam lowered their flags to half-mast. In
some places, such as the Cam Ranh Naval Base, however, white soldiers
celebrated by raising the Confederate flag and burning crosses. Following
Kings murder, the Department of Defense tried to ban the Confederate flag.
Race is our most serious international problem, a Pentagon representative
said. But Dixiecrat politicians, who controlled the votes President Lyndon
Johnson needed to fund the war, objected and the Pentagon backpedaled.
Instead of enforcing the ban, it turned to sensitivity training. The
Confederate flag, a black military instructor told a class of black and
white soldiers at Fort Dix, does not necessarily mean a man belongs to the
Ku Klux Klan.
The Sum of All Lost Causes
Back home, a backlash against the antiwar movement helped nationalize the
Confederate flag. The banner was increasingly seen not just at gatherings of
the fringe KKK and the John Birch Society, but at patriotic rallies in
areas of the country outside the old South: in Detroit, Chicago, California,
Pennsylvania, and Connecticut. For instance, on June 14, 1970 -- Flag Day --
pro-war demonstrators marched up Pittsburgs Liberty Avenue with a large
Confederate flag demanding that Washington... get in there and win.
For many, the Confederate flag remained an emblem of racist reaction to
federal efforts to advance equal rights and integration. Yet as issues of
race, militarism, and class resentment merged into a broader cultural war,
some in the rising New Right rallied around the Stars and Bars to avenge not
the South, but South Vietnam.
In 1973, shortly after the U.S. officially ended combat operations in South
Vietnam, for instance, Bart Bonner, a conservative activist and Vietnam
veteran from Waterbury, New York, met with South Vietnams military attaché
in Washington and offered to raise a private, volunteer force of 75,000
American veterans to fight in South Vietnam under the Confederate flag. For
Bonner, and many like him, that flag now stood not for the lost cause but
all lost causes conservatives cared about, an icon of resistance to the
liberal Establishment.
Bonner told Soldier of Fortune magazine that he had the financial support of
Texas millionaire Ross Perot and 100 men, including former Green Berets, Air
Force commandos, and Navy Seals, ready to show the people of South
Vietnam... that not all Americans are cowards. He added: The Stars and
Bars -- the Confederate flag -- is a beautiful flag.
Nothing came of Bonners plan. But the scheme did anticipate many of the
strategies the New Right would use to circumvent all those cumbersome
restrictions the post-Vietnam Congress placed on the ability of the
executive branch to wage war and conduct covert operations, including the
rise of mercenary groups that continue to play a significant role in
fighting Americas wars and attempts to raise money from private, often
southern rightwing sources. Ross Perot, for instance, would fund some of
Oliver Norths effort to run a foreign policy independent of congressional
oversight, a scandal that would become known as Iran-Contra.
Moonlight, Magnolia, and My Lai
Before Watergate brought him down, President Richard Nixon fused overseas
militarism and domestic racism into one noxious whole as part of his
strategy to win the South in 1972 and secure his reelection. In southern
Africa, where Black-led national liberation movements were contesting white
rule, this meant putting in place National Security Adviser Henry
Kissingers Tar-Baby Tilt, strengthening ties with the white supremacist
nations of South Africa and Rhodesia. Support for Pretoria and Salisbury was
popular in Biloxi.
But the foreign-policy centerpiece of Nixons Southern Strategy was
Vietnam. Senator George McGovern summed the situation up this way after
being told by Kissinger that the U.S. couldnt exit Vietnam because the
bosss whole constituency would just fall apart: They were willing to
continue killing Asians and sacrificing the lives of young Americans because
of their interpretation of what would play in the United States.
The infamous March 1968 massacre at My Lai would prove especially useful in
helping Nixon win the Moonlight and Magnolia set. After it came to light
that members of the 23rd Infantry Division, also known as the Americal, had
slaughtered more than 500 Vietnamese civilians, including women, children,
and infants, Nixon made his support for Lieutenant William Calley, the only
soldier convicted for taking part in the massacre, a key element in his
reelection campaign. As historian Joseph Fry points out in his new book, The
American South and the Vietnam War, Calley, who was from Florida, was
extremely popular in the South. George Wallace, the segregationist governor
of Alabama, flew to Fort Benning, where Calley was being held under house
arrest, to speak at a rally, replete with Confederate flags. Mississippi
Governor John Bell Williams told Nixons vice president, Spiro Agnew, that
his state was "about ready to secede from the union" over Calley.
The campaign to depict Calley as an honorable warrior scapegoated by elites
was but one more opportunity to generalize the historical experience of
southern humiliation into an ongoing national sentiment. As after 1865, the
solution to such humiliation has been more war, forever war. And with
endless war comes an endless tolerance for atrocities. Most people dont
give a shit whether he killed them or not, Nixon said of Calleys actions
at My Lai. The villagers got what they deserved, commented Louisiana
Senator Allen Ellender. You can draw a straight line from such
hard-heartedness to todays torture coalition, to men like Dick Cheney, who
defend inflicting pain on innocent people as long as we achieve our
objective.
The Confederate flag still flies overseas. It was carried into Iraq in 2003.
In Afghanistan, at the infamous Bagram Theater Internment Facility, a
platoon implicated in the torture of detainees, known as the the
Testosterone Gang, hung a Confederate flag in their tent.
It is good to see the Confederate flag coming down in some places, but I
suspect that reports of its final furling are premature. Endless wars will
always have their atrocities. And atrocities will always find a flag.
© 2014 TomDispatch.com
Greg Grandin
The Confederate Flag at War (But Not the Civil War)
by
Greg Grandin
2 Comments
In this 1967 press photo by Toshio Sakai, U.S. soldiers in Vietnam
ride a tank displaying a Confederate flag. (Photo: manhhai/flickr/cc)
The Pentagon just cant let go. In the wake of the Charleston
Massacre, Amazon and Walmart have announced that they will no longer sell
Confederate flag merchandise. Ebay says it will stop offering Confederate
items for electronic auction. The Republican governor of Mississippi calls
his state flag, which includes the Stars and Bars in the top left corner, a
point of offense that needs to be removed. Even Kentuckys Mitch McConnell,
the majority leader of the U.S. Senate, agrees that a statue of Confederate
President Jefferson Davis in his state's capitol building belongs in a
museum.
Yet the Department of Defense says it isnt even reviewing the
possibility of a ban on the flag, deciding instead to leave any such move to
the various service branches, while military bases named after Confederate
officers will remain so. One factor in this decision: the South provides
more than 40% of all military recruits, many of them white; only 15% are
from the Northeast.
Filling the ranks isn't, however, the only reason for the militarys
refusal to act.
Over the last few weeks, there has been near unanimous agreement
among liberal and mainstream commentators that the Confederate flag
represents hate, not heritage. The flags current presence in American
culture is ubiquitous. It adorns license plates, bumper stickers, mugs,
bodies (via tattoos), and even baby diapers. The flags popularity is
normally traced back to the post-World War II reaction of the Dixiecrat
South to the Civil Rights Movement. South Carolina, for instance, raised the
Stars and Bars over its state house in 1961 as part, columnist Eugene
Robinson said on "Meet the Press," of its massive resistance to racial
desegregation."
All true. But like many discussions of American conservativism, this account
misses the role endless war played in sustaining domestic racism. Starting
around 1898, well before it became an icon of redneck backlash, the
Confederate Battle Flag served for half a century as an important pennant in
the expanding American empire and a symbol of national unification, not
polarization.
It was a reconciled Army that moved out into the world after the Civil War,
an unstoppable combination of Northern law (bureaucratic command and
control, industrial might, and technology) and Southern spirit (an
exaltation of military ideals and virtues, including valor, duty, and
honor). Both law and spirit had their dark sides leading to horrors
committed due either to the very nature of the American empire -- the
genocide of Native Americans, for example, or the war in Southeast Asia --
or to the particular passions of some of its soldiers. And both law and
spirit had their own flags.
Lost Cause Found
Northerners and Southerners agreed on little in the years after the Civil
War, historians Boyd Cothran and Ari Kelman write, except that the Army
should pacify Western tribes. Reconstruction -- Washingtons effort to set
the terms for the Souths readmission to the Union and establish postwar
political equality -- was being bitterly opposed by defeated white
separatists. According to Cothran and Kelman, however, Many Americans found
rare common ground on the subject of Manifest Destiny.
After the surrender at Appomattox, it was too soon to fly the Stars and Bars
against Native Americans. And it was Union officers -- men like generals
George Armstrong Custer and Philip Sheridan -- who committed most of the
atrocities against indigenous peoples. But Confederate veterans and their
sons used the pacification of the West as a readmission program into the
U.S. Army. The career of Luther Hare, a Texas son of a Confederate captain,
is illustrative. He barely survived Custers campaign against the Sioux.
Cornered in a skirmish that preceded Little Big Horn, Hare opened fire and
let out a rebel yell before escaping. He then went on to fight Native
Americans in Montana, Texas, the Pacific Northwest, and Arizona, where he
put down the last of the renegade Apaches, before being sent to the
Philippines as a colonel. There, he led a detachment of Texans against the
Spanish.
With Reconstruction over and Jim Crow segregation installed in every
southern State, the Spanish-American War of 1898, in which the U.S. took
Cuba and Puerto Rico in the Caribbean and the Philippines and Guam in the
Pacific, was a key moment in the rehabilitation of the Confederacy. Earlier,
when slavery was still a going concern, southerners had yearned to separate
Cuba from Spain and turn it into a slave state. Now, conquering the island
served a different purpose: a chance to prove their patriotism and reconcile
with the North.
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. Lees 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 celebrations 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 Cemeterys
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 NAACPs 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 banners
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 wasnt. 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
We are fighting and dying in a war that is not very popular in the first
place, Lieutenant Eddie Kitchen, a 33-year-old African-American stationed
in Vietnam, wrote his mother in Chicago in late February 1968, and we still
have some people who are still fighting the Civil War. Kitchen, who had
been in the military since 1955, reported a rapid proliferation of
Confederate flags, mounted on jeeps and flying over some bases. The Negroes
here are afraid and cannot do anything, Kitchen added. Two weeks later he
was dead, officially listed as killed in action. His mother believed that
he had been murdered by white soldiers in retaliation for objecting to the
flag.
Kitchens was one of many such complaints, as the polarization tearing
through domestic politics in the United States, along with the symbols of
White Supremacy -- not just the Confederate flag but the burning cross, the
Klan robe and hood, and racist slurs -- spilled into Vietnam. As early as
Christmas Day 1965, a number of white soldiers paraded in front of the
audience of conservative comedian Bob Hopes USO show at Bien Hoa Air Base.
After they were seated, wrote an African-American soldier protesting the
display, several officers and NCOs [non-commissioned officers] were seen
posing and taking pictures under the flag. I felt like an outsider. An
African-American newspaper, the Chicago Defender, reported that southern
Whites were infecting Vietnamese with their racism. The Confederate flags
seem more popular in Vietnam than the flags of several countries, the paper
wrote, judging by the display of flags for sale on a Saigon street corner.
Black soldiers who pushed back against such Dixie-ism were subject to insult
and abuse. Some were thrown in the stockade. When Private First Class Danny
Frazier complained of the damn flag flown by Alabama soldiers in his
barracks to his superior officers, he was ordered to do demeaning work and
then demoted.
Martin Luther King, Jr., was assassinated in early April 1968 and American
military bases throughout South Vietnam lowered their flags to half-mast. In
some places, such as the Cam Ranh Naval Base, however, white soldiers
celebrated by raising the Confederate flag and burning crosses. Following
Kings murder, the Department of Defense tried to ban the Confederate flag.
Race is our most serious international problem, a Pentagon representative
said. But Dixiecrat politicians, who controlled the votes President Lyndon
Johnson needed to fund the war, objected and the Pentagon backpedaled.
Instead of enforcing the ban, it turned to sensitivity training. The
Confederate flag, a black military instructor told a class of black and
white soldiers at Fort Dix, does not necessarily mean a man belongs to the
Ku Klux Klan.
The Sum of All Lost Causes
Back home, a backlash against the antiwar movement helped nationalize the
Confederate flag. The banner was increasingly seen not just at gatherings of
the fringe KKK and the John Birch Society, but at patriotic rallies in
areas of the country outside the old South: in Detroit, Chicago, California,
Pennsylvania, and Connecticut. For instance, on June 14, 1970 -- Flag Day --
pro-war demonstrators marched up Pittsburgs Liberty Avenue with a large
Confederate flag demanding that Washington... get in there and win.
For many, the Confederate flag remained an emblem of racist reaction to
federal efforts to advance equal rights and integration. Yet as issues of
race, militarism, and class resentment merged into a broader cultural war,
some in the rising New Right rallied around the Stars and Bars to avenge not
the South, but South Vietnam.
In 1973, shortly after the U.S. officially ended combat operations in South
Vietnam, for instance, Bart Bonner, a conservative activist and Vietnam
veteran from Waterbury, New York, met with South Vietnams military attaché
in Washington and offered to raise a private, volunteer force of 75,000
American veterans to fight in South Vietnam under the Confederate flag. For
Bonner, and many like him, that flag now stood not for the lost cause but
all lost causes conservatives cared about, an icon of resistance to the
liberal Establishment.
Bonner told Soldier of Fortune magazine that he had the financial support of
Texas millionaire Ross Perot and 100 men, including former Green Berets, Air
Force commandos, and Navy Seals, ready to show the people of South
Vietnam... that not all Americans are cowards. He added: The Stars and
Bars -- the Confederate flag -- is a beautiful flag.
Nothing came of Bonners plan. But the scheme did anticipate many of the
strategies the New Right would use to circumvent all those cumbersome
restrictions the post-Vietnam Congress placed on the ability of the
executive branch to wage war and conduct covert operations, including the
rise of mercenary groups that continue to play a significant role in
fighting Americas wars and attempts to raise money from private, often
southern rightwing sources. Ross Perot, for instance, would fund some of
Oliver Norths effort to run a foreign policy independent of congressional
oversight, a scandal that would become known as Iran-Contra.
Moonlight, Magnolia, and My Lai
Before Watergate brought him down, President Richard Nixon fused overseas
militarism and domestic racism into one noxious whole as part of his
strategy to win the South in 1972 and secure his reelection. In southern
Africa, where Black-led national liberation movements were contesting white
rule, this meant putting in place National Security Adviser Henry
Kissingers Tar-Baby Tilt, strengthening ties with the white supremacist
nations of South Africa and Rhodesia. Support for Pretoria and Salisbury was
popular in Biloxi.
But the foreign-policy centerpiece of Nixons Southern Strategy was
Vietnam. Senator George McGovern summed the situation up this way after
being told by Kissinger that the U.S. couldnt exit Vietnam because the
bosss whole constituency would just fall apart: They were willing to
continue killing Asians and sacrificing the lives of young Americans because
of their interpretation of what would play in the United States.
The infamous March 1968 massacre at My Lai would prove especially useful in
helping Nixon win the Moonlight and Magnolia set. After it came to light
that members of the 23rd Infantry Division, also known as the Americal, had
slaughtered more than 500 Vietnamese civilians, including women, children,
and infants, Nixon made his support for Lieutenant William Calley, the only
soldier convicted for taking part in the massacre, a key element in his
reelection campaign. As historian Joseph Fry points out in his new book, The
American South and the Vietnam War, Calley, who was from Florida, was
extremely popular in the South. George Wallace, the segregationist governor
of Alabama, flew to Fort Benning, where Calley was being held under house
arrest, to speak at a rally, replete with Confederate flags. Mississippi
Governor John Bell Williams told Nixons vice president, Spiro Agnew, that
his state was "about ready to secede from the union" over Calley.
The campaign to depict Calley as an honorable warrior scapegoated by elites
was but one more opportunity to generalize the historical experience of
southern humiliation into an ongoing national sentiment. As after 1865, the
solution to such humiliation has been more war, forever war. And with
endless war comes an endless tolerance for atrocities. Most people dont
give a shit whether he killed them or not, Nixon said of Calleys actions
at My Lai. The villagers got what they deserved, commented Louisiana
Senator Allen Ellender. You can draw a straight line from such
hard-heartedness to todays torture coalition, to men like Dick Cheney, who
defend inflicting pain on innocent people as long as we achieve our
objective.
The Confederate flag still flies overseas. It was carried into Iraq in 2003.
In Afghanistan, at the infamous Bagram Theater Internment Facility, a
platoon implicated in the torture of detainees, known as the the
Testosterone Gang, hung a Confederate flag in their tent.
It is good to see the Confederate flag coming down in some places, but I
suspect that reports of its final furling are premature. Endless wars will
always have their atrocities. And atrocities will always find a flag.
© 2014 TomDispatch.com
