Contested American Identities: the Confederate Flag

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Contested American Identitiesthe Confederate
Flag

• Why are Confederate flags and monuments open to
  competing interpretations that trigger intense
  political controversy?

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The Iconography of the Flag

• ...the dispute over the flag may be viewed as
  being waged between people who wish to maintain a
  strong regional, if not national, identity for
  the South or the former Confederacy and people
  who want to create the New South that might be
  more integrated into the country as a whole, with
  or without a defined set of regional symbols.
  (Webster 1994)

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Traditionalists Story

• A symbol of regional pride
• A symbol for the common soldier of the south -
  battlefield valor
• a symbol of southern heritage which includes many
  elements
• Southern agricultural economy vs. Northern
  capitalism
• Southern hospitality and manners
• Southern independence

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• "Preserving Our Heritage Since 1861"

• We wish to preserve, educate others about, and
  show pride in true Southern history, and the
  Southern way of life.
• We wish to represent these values in our artwork
  and apparel.

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ReconstructionistsStory

• a symbol of a defeated nation whose 'cornerstone'
  was slavery
• symbol of hate, segregation, white supremacy

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• use by KKK and white Southerners as anti-civil
  rights symbol after Brown v. Board of Education
  ruling in 1954
• contemporary meaning of flag for White Georgians

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Contested American Identities Mt. Rushmore
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Purposes of Monuments Functionalist Perspective

• Commemorate events
• Honor individuals / groups
• Serve a sense of collective identity
• Instill a sense of national pride

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Quote

• Commemorative activity is by definition social
  and political, for it involves the coordination
  of individual and group memories, whose results
  may appear consensual when they are in fact the
  product of processes of intense contest,
  struggle, and in some instances, annihilation.
• Commemorations The Politics of National
  Identity
• By John Gillis

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Mount Rushmore

• Who and what does the monument celebrate?
• What does it suggest about the relationship
  between humans and the environment?
• What does it suggest about American national
  identity?
• How might different ethnic groups view the
  monument?

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Sculptor Gutzon Borglum

• American citizen / artist
• Commissioned in 1929
• Borglum known for creating artwork that conveyed
  Western conquest
• He became prominent in elite political circles

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Borghlums Vision of The Monument

• Tribute to Manifest Destiny
• Intended to convey idea that European Americans
  should and would inevitably expand the boundaries
  of the nation
• Intended as a celebration of White supremacy

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Borglums Views of White Supremacy

• The Nordic races have been and continue today the
  pioneers of the world. They are the builders of
  world empire - - - it may safely be said that all
  invention, analytical science, deductive
  philosophy have been pushed forward by these
  venturesome people, who have subdued savages,
  beautified and peopled what was once a
  wilderness
• From unpublished article written during KKK
  membership periodquoted in Mount Rushmore by
  Jesse Larner

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Borglums Views Continued

• Too little has been written, on the wide freedoms
  secured, the virgin worlds offered -- unpeopled,
  untilled, ungoverned -- the nomads incapable of
  resisting . . . No one has sung, painted, or
  carved adequately the story of this irresistible
  God-man movement that fled its ancient moorings .
  . . Following the sun into the unknown west!
• San Francisco Examiner, 1934quoted in Mount
  Rushmore by Jesse Larner

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Challenging the Monument

• Desecrates landscape
• Invades Lakota Territory violates treaty
• Black Hills considered sacred ground- Indian
  view of human relationship to land
• Celebrates European settlers who killed Indians
  and appropriated their land
• Commodifies the land

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Question posed by Jesse Larner

• What if the government were to restore federal
  land in the Black Hills to the Lakota and let
  them decide what to do with Rushmore and how to
  interpret it?
• From Mount Rushmore an Icon Reconsidered

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Re-imagining the Monument
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Final Quotes Jesse Larner

• Monuments are built to stop unauthorized
  historical interpretation. Their purpose is to
  seal up meaning at a particular time, set it in
  stone, end debate. . . . There are lots of
  historically problematic structures in a world
  strewn with monuments to empire. . . .
• From Mount Rushmore an Icon Reconsidered

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Final Quotes Jesse Larner

• It seems inevitable that, at some time not very
  far in the future, Rushmore will have to confront
  this fact, and the racial ideology that justified
  it . . . Until that happens, it will be a
  monument not to truth but to a part of a truth,
  not to Americas greatness, but to the capacity
  for self-deception . . .
• From Mount Rushmore an Icon Reconsidered

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Skins

• To see this movie is to understand why the faces
  on Mount Rushmore are so painful and galling to
  the first Americans
• Roger Ebert, Film Credit