Confederates in the Attic (44 page)

The park’s management had also chosen to soften the Confederate content of a popular laser show that used the sculpture as a backdrop. Curious to see the result, I joined several thousand people strewn on blankets and banana chairs at the mountain’s base. As the lights came up, I was struck by how different Stone Mountain was from Mount Rushmore. Here, the figures were shown in profile, in relatively shallow relief, as though a huge Confederate coin had left a fossil-like print in the mountain’s face.

This impression lasted about ten seconds, the time it took for the sound track to kick on, playing as overture a familiar soft-drink jingle: “There’s always Coca-Cola!” Laser beams created a Coke bottle dancing across the mounted Confederates. This was followed by a cartoon strip featuring a good ol’ boy named Buford, traveling through a time tunnel—though not very far. Animated rock guitarists flashed onto the mountain to the strains of ZZ Top and the Beatles. This segued into the theme song from
Beverly Hills Cop
, accompanied by abstract images: trapezoids, stars, clusters.

No musical riff or laser image lasted more than a few seconds. I caught snatches of the B-52s singing “Heading down the Atlanta Highway” and Alabama doing “Forty Hour Week.” Charlie Daniels’s “The Devil Went Down to Georgia” collided with Ed Sullivan introducing the Beatles as airplanes landed to the strains of “Back in the U.S.S.R.” Then came sports iconography—the Braves, the Falcons, the Hawks—before Elvis appeared, thrusting his pelvis across Traveller’s rippling flank. At this point, I felt sure I could hear Robby Lee and his famous mount rolling over in their graves up in Lexington.

The show concluded in a blur of cliches: Scarlett O’Hara, peaches, plantations, and the mascots of various Georgia universities. Then Elvis appeared again, singing “Dixie” in a slow, sensual drawl as the
lasers outlined Lee, Jackson and Davis. The crowd began to cheer. But as the mounted men sprang to life and galloped across Stone Mountain, “Dixie” segued into the “Battle Hymn of the Republic” and Lee broke his sword across his leg. The two halves of the blade quickly transmogrified into a map of North and South, merging together as the sound track belted, “His truth is marching on.” Finally, to expunge any last hint of the Cause, the sound track played “God Bless the U.S.A.” amidst images of the Lincoln Memorial, JFK’s grave, Martin Luther King Jr., and a ballot box. Fireworks exploded and the mountain became, in turn, an immense American flag, the Statue of Liberty and Mount Rushmore. The music and lasers abruptly cut off and the three horsemen of the Confederacy melted into the night.

I sat there for a while, letting “Dixie” and the “Battle Hymn” and Lee and Lincoln and Elvis all jangle around in my head. The show was a puddle of political correctness. The message seemed to be that there was no message—no real content to any of the divisive figures or songs or historic episodes the laser show depicted in its fast-paced cartoon. Why debate who should or shouldn’t be remembered and revered when you could just stuff the whole lot in a blender and spew it across the world’s biggest rock?

Like so much in Atlanta, Stone Mountain had become a bland and inoffensive consumable: the Confederacy as hood ornament. Not for the first time, though more deeply than ever before, I felt a twinge of affinity for the neo-Confederates I’d met in my travels. Better to remember Dixie and debate its philosophy than to have its largest shrine hijacked for Coca-Cola ads and MTV songs.

B
UT THEN
, even neo-Confederates in Atlanta were different. While traveling the South, I’d often encountered representatives of the Heritage Preservation Association, an Atlanta-based group renowned for its attack-dog tactics in defense of the rebel flag. So I made a lunch date with the group’s president, Lee Collins. I expected to encounter a gaunt, fiery-eyed man with a rebel-flag pin and nineteenth-century hair—the sort of figure I’d often met at neo-Confederate gatherings. Instead, I was greeted at my hotel by a groomed, thirty-something
preppy who wore a button-down shirt, a designer tie and horn-rimmed glasses.

“We can eat Southern,” Lee Collins said as we climbed into his minivan, “or we can go further South than that.” Intrigued, I chose the latter. Collins picked up his car phone and began chatting in Spanish. Then to me: “My wife’s Colombian and I’ve been itching to try this place.” Collins turned up Buford Highway, the main thoroughfare of immigrant Atlanta, and drove past Asian noodle bars and Muslim butchers before pulling into a hole-in-the-wall cantina. Collins ordered off the menu, again in fluent Spanish.

“We have a culture—Southern culture—that’s been bleached from the fabric of America,” Collins said, slathering tortilla chips with hot sauce. “My children are half-Hispanic and I’m proud of that. But they’re also half-Southern. I want them to be proud of that, too.”

Collins had met his wife through a Colombian folklore and dance group. Since then, he’d made a number of Hispanic contacts, which had helped expand his non-Confederate livelihood: a computer-consulting business. “My background is engineering,” he said. “I’m trained to identify problems, implement and monitor a solution, then move on to the next problem. We don’t get wrapped up in emotion. The same goes for the Heritage Preservation Association.”

The HPA had a computer bulletin board and a toll-free hot line (1-800-TO DIXIE) so members could report “heritage violations,” such as a hotel chain’s decision to stop displaying the Georgia state banner, which incorporated the rebel flag. The HPA ran ads, directed letter-writing campaigns, lobbied the state legislature during debates over the flag. The HPA even had a political action committee, or PAC, to funnel money to sympathetic candidates.

“The heritage movement is a brand-new industry,” Collins said, hoeing into rice and beans. “It’s like Lotus was ten years ago, producing spread sheets while others produced software. Now, Lotus will sell you a database. We’ve created a niche, too. A niche of the civil rights industry. Our niche is Southern heritage.”

Collins also had learned to appropriate the idiom of civil rights and of liberal groups combating discrimination. “We’re chosen people, surviving many atrocities,” he said, sounding like a spokesman for the Anti-Defamation League. Mimicking the NAACP, the HPA
had created a legal-defense team to assist victims of bias, such as a textile worker who was fired for pasting a battle flag to his toolbox.

“The main thing I’ve learned from the civil rights movement is the power of perseverance,” Collins said. “It took fifteen years to get the Martin Luther King holiday. We’re in this for the long haul.”

Most other neo-Confederates I’d met were romantics. The South they revered was hot-blooded, Celtic, heedlessly courageous; their poster boy was the Scottish clansman played by Mel Gibson in the splatterfest
Braveheart
. In their view, rationalism and technological efficiency were suspect Yankee traits, derived from a mercantile English empire that had put down the Scots and Irish.

Collins was well acquainted with this philosophy, but he didn’t subscribe to it as an organizing tool for today’s struggle. “Nostalgia’s not a powerful enough force,” he said. “If it were, the Sons of Confederate Veterans would have ten million members and the Christian Coalition would have a thousand.”

Even so, Collins wasn’t immune to certain strains of neo-Confederate ideology. In his view, Atlanta’s New South trappings were simply an extension of the Civil War and the North’s efforts to mold Dixie in its own image. “The New South breaks the back of the agrarian economy and promotes an industrial South,” he said. “That’s succeeded. But it hasn’t captured the hearts and minds of the people.”

To Collins, this helped explain Atlanta’s suburban sprawl. “People here still have a rural mentality. They want space,” he said. “Southerners may work in a factory but they still dream of owning a farm.” No matter how many Northerners flocked to Atlanta, an essential Southernness would endure. “We have an extra layer of armor. Our culture.”

Collins’s armor deflected every arrow I tried to fling at his arguments. The heritage movement wasn’t backward-looking, he said; it was tuned precisely to the times. “We’re anti-federal. Con-federal, if you like. I’d rather that Georgia not get one federal dollar.” He believed this same independent streak had sparked the Civil War, which in his view was fought over economic issues and constitutional sovereignty. “If all the South wanted to do was maintain slavery, the easiest
way was to stay in the Union, where slavery was legal.” Nor did the rebel flag symbolize the oppression of blacks; after all, the Stars and Stripes flew over slavery for eighty years, which the battle flag of the South never did. “The Confederacy was an attempt to institute a strict interpretation of the Constitution. Period.”

I’d heard most of this before, but never so slickly presented—and never over plantains and chile verde. Collins even offered an entrepreneurial critique of Atlanta’s failure to exploit Confederate history. “We have a natural resource, it’s inexhaustible. That resource is Southern heritage. Stone Mountain—people don’t come there to ski, they come because it’s a Confederate memorial. It makes me sick, the lost opportunity to capitalize on something we have. It’s bigger than oil because it’s inexhaustible and it doesn’t pollute the atmosphere.”

Collins was a busy man. He tossed down a cup of café con leche and handed me a business card and a copy of the HPA’s “mission statement.” One thing he wouldn’t share, though, was the size of his organization. “In keeping with the strategy of Lee at Appomattox,” he said, “I don’t release numbers. The element of uncertainty has been good for us.”

B
ACK AT MY MOTEL
, flipping through the HPA’s literature, I noticed an ad for another enterprise I’d often wondered about while traveling the South: a north Georgia business called the Ruffin Flag Company. I’d seen Ruffin wares advertised in dozens of Southern publications, and for sale at shops and reenactments across the region. It struck me that Ruffin Flag might be a good place to take the commercial pulse of the neo-Confederacy, and to get a better sense of the movement’s size and shape than Lee Collins was willing to give me. Also, the name of the company’s owner intrigued me. Soren Dresch didn’t sound like the usual Celtic-blooded descendant of Confederate soldiers.

Ruffin Flag was based east of Atlanta in a small town whose loquacious sign—“A Dixie Welcome to Crawfordville, Ga. Homes, Stores, Schools, Churches, Factories and Business Locations”—announced a depleted downtown where many of the homes, factories
and businesses were now abandoned. Main Street, lined with decayed storefronts and fading “Soda Malt” signs, had the picturesque seediness of a Deep South movie set, which it frequently had been.

Crawfordville also was the hometown of the Confederacy’s asthmatic and ascerbic vice president, Alexander Hamilton Stephens. In refreshing contrast to modern vice presidents, Stephens didn’t hesitate to bad-mouth his boss, once calling Jeff Davis “weak and vacillating, petulant, peevish, obstinate but not firm.” His mansion, Liberty Hall, still perched at the edge of town, its slave quarters intact. Just across the street stood a wood bungalow with a rebel flag flying out front. This was the headquarters of the Ruffin Flag Company, quite literally a cottage industry.

Just inside the bungalow’s front door, I found Ruffin’s owner punching holes in leather belts decorated with the rebel banner. Soren Dresch was a doughy, balding man of thirty-one. He wore khakis, docksiders and a polo shirt, and spoke with a Northern accent. At first glance, he could have passed for the slightly rumpled manager of a Cape Cod yacht club.

This wasn’t too far off the mark. When I asked about Dresch’s name, he explained that his father was a philosophy major and Yale Ph.D. with a fondness for the gloomy Dane, Sören Kierkegaard. “My full name’s Soren K. Dresch,” he said, “but the K’s just a K. Dad liked Kafka, too, I guess.”

Raised in New Haven, Connecticut, Dresch had displayed Copperhead tendencies from an early age. “I had a shrine to the Confederacy in my room. Rebel flags, license plates, things I’d gotten through the mail.” Dresch wasn’t sure where this allegiance came from. His father’s family hailed from Kansas, his mother’s from Ohio. “My dad was a liberal sixties-type, he rebelled against the system,” Dresch said. “Maybe I was rebelling against him. He hated all my stuff and once tried to throw it out.”

But Dresch remained a rebel, seceding to the University of Alabama after high school. It was there that he’d discovered a flair for commerce. His first enterprise: importing cheap rebel flags and selling them to students. This was the mid-1980s, when attacks on the flag by the NAACP and other groups helped spark a renascence of passion for the flag, particularly at Deep South universities. Then,
like Lee Collins, Dresch found a niche he could fill. “There was this void at the quality end of the market,” he said.

Dresch took me into his showroom, in what had once been the parlor of the modest cottage. He pointed to a rack of license plates, including one sold by a competitor: “Save Yo’ Confederate Money Boys—the South’s Gonna Rise Again.” Dresch grimaced with distaste. “When I started, that was the only sort of stuff on the market. Rebel-flag bug screens, bumper stickers, and tacky T-shirts. Rednecky stuff.” One entrepreneur even marketed a rebel-flag bandanna that doubled as a diaper.

Dresch showed me one of his own license plates, bearing the Confederate seal: George Washington and the motto
Deo Vindice
. Another plate displayed the Alabama state flag: a red Saint Andrew’s Cross set on a white field. “Quality,” Dresch said. “Taste. When I started in business I thought the cheapest stuff would sell best. But the opposite is true because the Confederacy is dear to people’s hearts. I’ve sold forty thousand license plates since 1992.”

He led me into another room, where a computer glowed in one corner beside a telephone answering machine. Dresch picked up an afghan decorated with the rebel flag. “Hand-loomed Carolina cloth,” he said, stroking the dense fabric. Quality Confederama didn’t come cheap. Some of Dresch’s wares sold for $100 apiece. “Customized flags are even more,” he said. For instance, a flag specially designed for draping a casket.