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Page 3 When I went to visit him in his Jackson law office the next day, Winter said he couldn't argue with that assessment. "Let's put it this way," he said. "The new flag did not lose because of what it looked like." Others aren't so sure. Moss's flag is handsome--more sharply defined and more classically attractive than Alexander's, to be sure--but it also looks as though it's been scrubbed clean. If the 1894 flag was burdened with too much history, Moss's version arguably offered too little. In a letter published a few weeks after the referendum in the Clarion-Ledger, Jackson's daily newspaper, a reader by the memorable name of Pepper Crutcher wrote that the new flag "said nothing about our triumphs, our tragedies, our pleasures, our pains, our memories or our hopes--in short, nothing at all about us...any of us. Every Mississippian with any soul at all knew this intuitively. The new flag proposal was generic. And if there's one thing Mississippians aren't, it's generic." Greg Stewart, a lawyer in Tunica, Mississippi, who helped organize opposition to the new flag--and who calls himself an old-fashioned, unreconstructed Confederate--argues that Moss's design was little more than a whitewash. "People in this state quickly realized that it was meaningless," Stewart says. "The circle of stars stood for absolutely nothing." Less strident defenders of the flag make a similar argument. Shelby Foote, the American Civil War historian who calls the Confederate cross "a symbol of gallantry," is wary of efforts to banish it from the public sphere. "There are a lot of terrible things that happened in American history," Foote told PBS's Elizabeth Farnsworth during the South Carolina controversy, "but we don't wipe 'em out of the history books; we don't destroy their symbols; we don't forget they ever happened; we don't resent anybody bringing it up." "The real scoundrels in all this," Foote said when I reached him by phone at his home, in Memphis, "are the right-wingers who have used the flag for their own nasty purposes. They should never have been allowed to touch it. That's what makes me understand the pain that some people feel when they see it. But to me that flag represents many fine things." Heading into the flag campaign early this year, Winter told me, "I was cautiously optimistic. But the hold of the Civil War is certainly as strong here as it is anywhere." (The day before I arrived in Jackson, the largest Civil War reenactment in Mississippi history, with more than 3,500 participants, had taken place in the town of Raymond.) "In Georgia," Winter added, "you've of course got Atlanta, which is an economic force with major international companies. They have to worry about opinion outside of the state. Mississippi is still largely rural, and the business community here is largely small business. People did not want to jeopardize those businesses--which are mostly supported by their neighbors--by coming out strongly in favor of the new flag." I asked Winter what white voters thought the old flag represented to those Mississippians who voted to keep it. "They equate it with the bravery and the sacrifice of their forebears," he answered. "And I understand that--I don't think it's necessarily a cover for a racist agenda. My grandfather was a Confederate soldier. And I sat on his knee listening to him tell me about fighting in the Civil War. I lost a great-grandfather in the Civil War. So I understand that deeply held reverence for those exploits of our forebears. But obviously I felt there were other considerations that outweighed those old feelings, and that the time had come for us to look at the flag as a symbol of unity for the future." In the end, he added, "The defenders of the old flag had more passion--much more passion. There were people who had never voted who went and registered specifically to vote for the old flag. There was not too much of that going on on the other side." A great irony of this story is that each state was presented with the proposed new flag design that the other seemingly deserved. Georgia--which has long been thought of as the continually rebuilding center of the New South, with gleaming skyscrapers and tens of thousands of immigrants from the north who care little for dusty Civil War tales--got a flag packed with meaningful historical symbols. Mississippi's more conservative and nostalgic populace, meanwhile, was confronted with a design as bright, shiny, and devoid of history as the streets of downtown Atlanta. The reasons for this are not mysterious. In Georgia, the flag became the design equivalent of a piece of legislation; it carries a number of marks bearing witness to its trip through the halls and backrooms of the state capitol. By contrast, the designers of Mississippi's new flag took pains to avoid any such signs of modification. And yet because the one part of the flag they removed, the Confederate cross, was the only element anyone had ever paid any attention to, they wound up with a design that struck Mississippi voters as offensively contemporary. But there is a key lesson buried in Moss and Alexander's experiences designing new flags, despite the almost inevitable failure of the Mississippi referendum. Moss knows as much about the history of flag design in the Southern United States as anyone. He diligently applied that knowledge to the new Mississippi flag, and the result was aesthetically unimpeachable. But as Moss himself would admit, he was little interested in thinking about the differences between design and politics--between a vexillological symbol and a cultural one. The journalist Jack Hitt has written about what he calls the "semiotics" of the Confederate flag: the way its symbols operate on several levels simultaneously and long ago surpassed what they once symbolized in political importance. The truth is that in the year 2001 it doesn't matter much that the Georgia flag is hard to read hanging from a pole, or that soldiers on a smoke-filled battlefield might confuse it with the flag of North Dakota or Louisiana, which also feature a gold seal on a blue background. In Georgia, the battleground that mattered was the state capitol. In Mississippi, it was the polling place. And on the ballot, Moss's design--in all its perfectly crisp full-color glory--was all too legible to the "ordinary folks" of Mississippi. Cecil Alexander brought a much different attitude to his design task: a sense of the long view, certainly, and a kind of wry and useful flexibility. He is justifiably proud of his work on the new Georgia flag, despite the fact that it's routinely pilloried by Confederate loyalists and vexillological purists. After I accompanied Alexander to the flag-raising ceremony in downtown Atlanta, the two of us sat talking for a while in his car in front of my hotel. I asked him, given his training at Harvard in the 1940s, if he considered himself a Modernist. Without hesitation, he said yes. I suggested that his design for the Georgia flag, with its postmodern "assemblage" of elements, hardly looked like the work of someone who'd studied with Walter Gropius and Marcel Breuer. Alexander laughed. "Well, I learned from them that form should follow function," he said. "And the function of this flag was to represent the state in a nondivisive way and to get approved by the state legislature. From that point of view I think it's done its job." |
