The Confederate Battle Flag

In the Church of Les Invalides in Paris there hangs on a staff and among many other flags the Swastika of Nazi Germany. It cannot be legally displayed anywhere in Germany itself, but here in the city where it was carried through the Arc de Triumphe in June 1940 and flew atop the Hotel de Ville for four awful years, it hangs in a church consecrated to the fallen. It is a captured flag.

After Lee handed his sword to Grant at Appomattox, Lincoln asked to hear "Dixie" on the White House lawn. The symbolism of this surprising request wavers between generosity and the fact that "Dixie" was a captured song. So one way of thinking about the Stars and Bars is that it is a captured flag, a defeated flag, a flag that belongs to history. But it is also an emblem of racist militias, of the Ku Klux Klan, and of various college fraternities. Its being on the State House at Columbia is as appropriate as Hitler's Swastika on the Knesset, or the Union Jack in Dublin.

Having said this, let's consider the matter from other angles. When I see motorcycle gangs wearing Nazi regalia, I know that I'm looking at ignorance and stupidity. They're too dumb to know what the symbols mean. They could not give you an account of the Second World War (of which many of them have never heard). Of disrespect to veterans of that war, to Jews, to the tortured and enslaved in the concentration camps, to ordinary decency they have no more concept than I of quantum physics. When I see the Confederate flag in front of a fraternity, I know that I'm looking at childish mindlessness. There is such a thing as obsolete patriotism: that's what I see when the South Carolina capitol displays the Confederate flag. And here we need to turn to the ambiguity of all symbols, for this flag obviously means one thing to some people, and something else to others. And how does a democracy deal with ambiguous symbols?

In Denmark you will see everywhere, in practically every yard, on boats and cars, the Danish flag, a white cross on a red field. It is Europe's oldest flag, handed down from heaven (they say) by the god of the Lutherans when the Danes were in a dire battle with their favorite enemy (and cousins) the Swedes. Up until the 19th century this flag was royal, flown only by the king and his ministers. But one day word went around that if every humble citizen displayed the flag, what then could the Palace do about it? So they did, and have ever since. (The Danes repeated this tactic under the Nazis--when all Jews were commanded to wear a Star of David on a yellow arm band, the whole country, even the king, donned yellow arm bands).

While we're on the subject of Danes, let us consider Sven Achen's International Flag Book, published in Copenhagen, a guide to all the world's contemporary flags. Hr. Achen gives us the Confederate flag as "the flag of the South" as if the last 140 years didn't exist. He may have found justification for his anachronism by noting that the state flags of Mississippi and Georgia incorporate the stars and bars, and that those of Florida and Alabama are St. Andrew's crosses, the old standard of Scotland (for its allusion to the Highland clans). The design of the Confederate flag takes its stars from Old Glory, symbolizing a state by each star, distributed along the arms of a St. Andrews cross: these stars have seceded from the Union just as the stars in the national flag had seceded from British rule.

American history chooses to forget that in 1814 a group of Disunionists headed by Gouverneur Morris (the man who gave us dollars and cents, Founding Father, diplomat, and instigator of the Erie Canal) planned to take the New England states out...