It is an interesting book and you should probably read it. But bear in mind that he went looking for these things—what you would see if you went might differ. The cover picture is of Bob Hodges, who plays a significant role in the book (I sometimes wondered if he existed). He’s a hardcore “reenactor,” willing to hike barefoot and eat hardtack and sleep in the rain—and not wash--in order to achieve the full experience. At one point the group march barefoot carrying live chickens to cook, and when they reach their target, they open up the mailbag to read the letters they had earlier written to themselves. These folk disdain reenactors as unrealistic.
Lots of people, not just from the USA, find the Civil War fascinating. Apparently Gone With the Wind is a huge cultural thing in Japan.
If you read nothing else, read the chapter with the interview with Shelby Foote. "In his view, those who saw the banner as synonymous with slavery had their history wrong. The battle flag was a combat standard, not a political symbol. ... But he pinned the blame for this on educated Southerners who allowed white supremacists to misuse the flag during the civil rights struggle." True or false? Read it for yourself.
Horwitz found “The South will rise again” types without apparent difficulty. As you might expect, they don’t like blacks, don’t like the feds, and don’t like Jews. In the places he found them, they don’t hide. They are part of the community, and not shy about talking to strangers. At least, so it seems—I don’t discount artistic license.
Why the fascination with the Confederacy? He found no single answer; and different people had a different mix of motives. Sympathy for the underdog, fascination with a group that fought hard against overwhelming odds and might have won independence (it was a close call thanks to Copperheads), dislike for blacks and sympathy for a group that didn’t like them either, dislike for centralized power and sympathy for a group that rebelled against it, ancestry--"these are my people", a sense of history--these great events happened right here--and fascination with the romantic heroes of the war. The Confederacy stands for a lot of different things. “Hate” and “heritage, not hate,” both.
In these “South will rise” groups, the actual veterans seemed to have a little more nuanced idea about the Confederate struggle. Surprise. The amount of historical ignorance is rather startling—one town considers itself to be emblematic of the Confederacy, when during the war it was with the Union.
The battlegrounds were in strategic places, and strategic places often remained important. The priorities people living and working there tended more to redevelopment than enshrinement. Horwitz was disappointed.
Not everything in the book revolves around reenactors or the Sons of Confederate Veterans and their ilk. He found places where the war seems to be solidly in the past. Mostly. And when he listened to the debate about the Arthur Ashe statue on Monument Avenue, he was surprised to find reasoned arguments. That says something to me about who he’d been hanging around with.
The continued existence of groups that dislike blacks and sometimes recommend violence taints relations of blacks with whites (who can you trust). On the other hand, the existence of groups of blacks that hate whites (yep, he finds them too, and at least as ignorant as their white counterparts) taints relationships of whites with blacks. By this time the extremes justify each other’s existence.
He admitted that his journeys don’t cover nearly enough cultural territory, and it is pretty obvious that it isn’t remotely representative. We’d be up past our eyebrows in reenactors if it were. The book is now 20 years old.
My experiences were all in large cities—probably “tainted with Yankee attitudes”—so I have no personal yardstick for estimating things. Wikipedia claims that the Sons of Confederate Veterans numbers about 100,000, which looks like less than .15% of the white population of the South. If you assume that similar organizations have similar numbers, maybe 1%. That’s noticeable. For comparison, about 3% of the population is either in prison or on parole. FWIW, in Wisconsin 2/3 of the prisoners committed a violent offence; so estimate that at least 2% of the population is violent. This varies substantially by race.
If you are interested in some of the aftereffects (as of 20 years ago) of the “rich man’s war and poor man’s fight,” read it.
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