“We stole countries with the cunning use of flags. Just sail around the world and stick a flag in. “I claim India for Britain!” They’re going “You can’t claim us, we live here! Five hundred million of us!” “Do you have a flag …? “No…” “Well, if you don’t have a flag, then you can’t have a country. Those are the rules… that I just made up!”
― Eddie Izzard, Eddie Izzard: Dress to kill
Since we just celebrated our Independence Day, I felt like I should take a moment to talk about the symbolic nature of flags. Places where flags fly are symbolic of the country or subservience one has to that flag. As Americans, we are flag obsessed, we fly flags over government buildings, homes, and classrooms. We pledge our allegiance to the flag and learn the myths of its creation in elementary school and have been celebrating its creation annually since 1949. However, as a southerner, this legacy is more complicated.
The Civil War has a complex history here. As Georgia becomes a state more and more of transplants, perhaps that history is becoming more distant, but from 1861 – 1865, we were not American. Having seceded by vote of the state legislature (though under duress, which is why a Georgian became Vice President), Georgia left the United States and joined a loose confederation, known as the Confederate States of America. Over the course of four years, Georgians died, Sherman burned across us, and we burned down Atlanta. Reconstruction followed, with the Ku Klux Klan taking over several counties. However, albeit reluctantly, Georgia was reabsorbed into the nation. We have littered our state with Confederate monuments, cemeteries, Stone Mountain, and our governor even added the Stars and Bars to our state flag to protest the growing Civil Rights Movement in 1956. However, we have moved on, at least on the surface.
Since 1896, we have declared Atlanta the “City too busy to Hate.” Our southern charm and diverse exterior hide a lot of the racial issues of the past few decades, but Stone Mountain and the recent fight to remove Confederate statuary from the courthouse in Decatur pulled back that veil. However, it is this struggle that we still can see in the Capitol Building.
By design from the Capitol Architect, each state gets to put two statues representing their state in the Capitol somewhere. There are Founding Fathers, like Massachusetts’ Samuel Adams, Vermont’s Ethan Allen, and New York’s George Clinton. There are Native Americans like Oklahoma’s Sequoyah, North Dakota’s Sakakawea, and Nebraska’s Chief Standing Bear. There are inventors and scientists like Ohio’s Thomas Edison, Pennsylvania’s Robert Fulton, and Georgia’s Crawford Long. However, the interesting ones are the ones that seem to challenge America in some way. Hawai’i gives us their unifying King, Kamehameha and a Belgian Catholic Missionary, Father Damien. California presents us with Spanish by way of Mexico Fr. Junipero Serra. These are not the strangest and definitely not problematic.
The State of Mississippi has chosen two Confederates, the first James Zachariah George who after the Civil War and Reconstruction came to the Senate and sculpted the Sherman Anti-Trust Act, but the other is far more complicated. The other was a West Point Cadet, US Representative, Senator, and Secretary of War, after which he returned to the Senate only to resign to become President of the Confederacy. Yup, Mississippi chose Jefferson Davis. As a personal shame to Georgia, other than the inventor of medical anesthetic, Georgia is represented by a statue of our sickliest public official and Vice President of the CSA, Alexander Stephens, a man so inconsequential he was left off of Stone Mountain is his own home state. Despite this bizarre and disappointing glossing over of history, one thing was true. The Confederate Flag never flew in the US Capitol. Never flew there until Jan 6th, 2021.
Symbols and symbolic gestures are important. They remind us who we are.
