by Tony Horwitz
I’d also absorbed the prejudices of non-Atlantans I’d met in my travels (admittedly, mostly folks of a traditional bent). To Southrons, as true sons and daughters of Dixie liked to call themselves, Atlanta was the anti-South: a crass, brash city built in the image of the Chamber of Commerce and overrun by carpetbaggers, corporate climbers and conventioneers. “Every time I look at Atlanta,” quipped John Shelton Reed, the South’s wittiest observer, “I see what a quarter million Confederate soldiers died to prevent.”
Atlanta-bashers had even made a science of the city’s disloyalty to Dixie. Reed, a sociologist by trade, cited surveys showing that Atlanta’s “pace of life”—as measured by walking speed, length of bank transactions, per capita wristwatch-wearing—exceeded the national average. Even worse, Atlantans ranked below average in their hospitality to strangers (i.e., making change or helping a blind person across the street). “The only thing remarkable about Atlanta,” Reed opined, “is the number and variety of table-dancing establishments.”
Arriving in Atlanta at dusk, I was mostly struck by the number and blandness of its malls and shops. The interstate deposited me in Buckhead, an upscale district that an Atlantan had recommended as “colorful” and “close in.” Cruising slowly down Peachtree, I passed Lenox Square (America’s first suburban mall), a restaurant with a sign that said “A Buckhead Tradition since February,” and countless “detail salons,” a hardcore breed of car wash where attendants cleaned vehicles with tweezers and Q-Tips. Every ten blocks or so stood a chain restaurant called Mick’s; the road map I’d picked up at a gas station labeled every Mick’s, posted like mileage markers all across town.
It was several Mick’s and six miles from Buckhead to Atlanta’s compact downtown. Whatever peach trees once bloomed here were gone, supplanted by a forest of office towers bearing corporate names: Coca-Cola, Delta, Georgia-Pacific, CNN. Climbing out of my car, I toured the only visible nineteenth-century survival: Underground Atlanta, a commercial district that remained below street level as the modern city grew up around it. Underground originally served as a railroad-side market where slaves and other “wares” were unloaded and sold. Now, its quaint gaslights illuminated renovated shopfronts: Victoria’s Secret, Sam Goody, Foot Locker, Hooter’s, The Gap.
Like most newcomers, bred on Gone With the Wind, I assumed that Sherman and his torch-wielding soldiers bore the principal blame for Atlanta’s arid modernity. This notion was also ingrained in the city’s self-image. Atlanta took the phoenix as its symbol; its motto was Resurgens. But the next day, at the Atlanta History Center, I learned that the modern city hadn’t exactly risen from Civil War ashes. “Atlantans leveled much more of Atlanta than Sherman did,” said Franklin Garrett, the city’s leading historian.
At eighty-nine, Garrett’s memory was so encyclopedic that the History Center held an annual trivia contest called “Stump Franklin.” He’d last been stumped several years before, when he failed to recall the name of a doorman at a 1920s department store. But he remembered the building. “Gone. Same as the whole block,” he said, consulting a map and ticking off the structures like so many extinct species.
Evanescence had always come with the territory in Atlanta. While most antebellum Southern cities—Savannah, Charleston, Mobile, New Orleans—grew up around colonial ports, Atlanta began only twenty-four years before the Civil War as a railroad end point called Terminus. Showing an early talent for reinvention, Terminus quickly shed its funereal name and became a bustling rail and munitions center during the Civil War. Retreating Confederates torched much of the city before Sherman’s men added to the bonfire. Even so, Garrett said, about a quarter of the city, including some 400 homes and buildings, survived the flames.
What old Atlanta couldn’t survive was the city’s ceaseless remaking of itself after the War. The devastation was so complete, Garrett said, that not a single antebellum building now remained. The city’s battlefields had fared just as badly. Peachtree Battle Shopping Center was virtually all that recalled the rebels’ rearguard assault at Peachtree Creek in July 1864. Even the name Peachtree had lost its historic cachet. Peachtree was such a desirable business address that hustling Atlantans had simply cloned it; there were now thirty-two streets with the fruit tree as part of their name.
While Garrett mourned the loss of so much history, he felt this devastation reflected the city’s essential character. “Atlanta’s always been on the go,” he said. “Never was a moonlight-and-magnolia city like Savannah or Charleston. It always had more of a Rhett Butler attitude than an Ashley Wilkes one.”
This go-go attitude had a progressive side, of course. It was an Atlanta newspaper editor, Henry Grady, who popularized the phrase “New South” in 1886 to describe a region ready to reconcile with the North—and ready for Northern investment. Atlanta was the first Southern city to abolish the poll tax and integrated far more easily than most urban centers. The city also began electing black mayors in the 1970s and had become a Mecca for middle-class blacks from across the nation. The Chamber of Commerce got in on the act, too, once taking as its slogan, “A City Too Busy to Hate.”
Like so much about Atlanta, this hype had a way of clouding reality. Atlanta’s inner city remained among the poorest and most crime-ridden in America, and urban blight was matched by frenzied white flight. Even so, it was impossible to wander downtown Atlanta without being struck by the profusion of black professionals and interracial couples, and by the casual mingling of blacks and whites at bars, lunch counters and offices.
But Atlanta’s comparative racial amity—and ceaseless peddling of its progressive image—abetted the city’s neglect of its past. Whatever history Atlanta couldn’t tear down, it bobbed around, lest any ugly blot from the past mar the city’s reputation. During the run-up to the 1996 Olympics, this sanitizing of the past became downright Orwellian. A suburb called Roswell, under pressure from corporate sponsors, deleted “antebellum” from the title of its annual historical festival (it also tried to bar Confederate reenactors from participating). Roswell’s Historic Preservation Commission also removed a marker pointing out slave quarters beside an antebellum home. “We’ll just put it right back out after the Olympics are over,” a local official said. “This is history.”
AT DAY’S END, as glass towers emptied downtown, I saw another side of Atlanta that boosters preferred not to advertise. While blacks headed home to urban neighborhoods or close-in suburbs south of downtown, whites streamed onto freeways toward distant enclaves, mostly north of the city. Atlantans referred to the beltway ringing the city as the “perimeter,” as though it represented a real frontier between the majority-black city and the overwhelmingly white suburbs. There was even a corporate outpost oxymoronically called “Perimeter Center.”
Atlantans also spoke of their beltway-ringed city as a doughnut. There were now two telephone area codes, one for “inside the doughnut,” the other for outside. And while the population of the city proper had dwindled since 1970, dipping below 500,000, the metro area had doubled in size to over three million people, mostly living outside the doughnut.
Joining a twelve-lane highway, I lost myself in the tangle of interstates leading out of the city. Despite its rapid growth, north Georgia remained remarkably pastoral. Greater Atlanta didn’t so much sprawl as metastasize, with exurban nodes appearing suddenly amidst piney woods, rolling hills and red-clay fields. Greater Atlanta had also sprouted an astonishing crop of gated communities. One, called Sweetbottom Plantation, offered upscale homes modeled on those in Charleston’s Battery and New Orlean’s Garden District: a bit of Old South grace transplanted to New South suburbs, with security gates and private roads.
I ended my drive at Stone Mountain, just east of the city. Reputedly the largest hunk of exposed granite in the world, the dome-shaped mountain poked up from Atlanta’s wooded perimeter like a very tall, very bald man in a crowd. Chiseled on its face was the world’s largest bas-relief sculpture, a three-acre carving of the Confederate trinity—Lee, J
ackson and Davis—riding horses and holding hats over their hearts. Lee alone stood nine stories tall.
Commissioned by the United Daughters of the Confederacy in 1915, and begun by the same artist who crafted Mount Rushmore, Stone Mountain was intended as the South’s foremost Confederate shrine. It also became a rallying place for the Ku Klux Klan, which was reborn there in 1915 and later declared Atlanta its Imperial City. But eighty years later, when the park at Stone Mountain’s base was named an Olympic venue, the Invisible Empire became, well, invisible. A museum exhibit on Stone Mountain, opening just before the Games, omitted any mention of the Klan. “I think some chapters are just better left to the historians,” Atlanta’s mayor told the local press.
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.
BUT 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 t
o 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.”