Confederates in the Attic

by Tony Horwitz

  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.”

  BACK 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.

  Dresch also sold smaller items: beer coolers, belts, dog collars. “But nothing racist,” he assured me. His bumper stickers stuck to innocuous slogans, such as, “Dixie: Old Times There Are Not Forgotten.” And his T-shirts tended toward black-and-white images of renowned Confederates, including one depicting a man with a long mane of white hair and a rifle perched against his knee. This was Edmund Ruffin, for whom Dresch’s company was named. A prominent antebellum agronomist who authored a ground-breaking treatise called “An Essay on Calcareous Manures,” Ruffin became a fanatical secessionist and allegedly fired the first shot at Fort Sumter.

  Four years later, depressed by the South’s defeat, Ruffin wrapped himself in a rebel flag and wrote a final diatribe in his diary, which Dresch had printed on the back of the T-shirt: “And now with my latest writing and utterance, and with what will be near my last breath, I here repeat and would willingly proclaim my unmitigated hatred to Yankee rule—to all political, social and business connections with Yankees, and the perfidious, malignant and vile Yankee race.” Ruffin then fired his last shot through his own brain.

  Dresch smiled. “I move a lot of Ruffins,” he said. But his best seller by far was a T-shirt emblazoned with another fierce Confederate: Nathan Bedford Forrest, the “Wizard of the Saddle” and first Imperial Wizard of the Klan. “Lee, of course, used to be our best seller,” Dresch said. “But Forrest has eclipsed Lee fivefold in the last few years.”

  Dresch’s success in selling Forrest T-shirts gave commercial confirmation to the trend I’d sensed across the South: a hardening, ideological edge to Confederate remembrance. As Dresch put it, “Southerners are getting tired of taking it on the chin. They’re getting more aggressive. Lee’s the Southern gentleman who represents reconciliation with the Union. Forrest represents the spirit of going after them with everything you’ve got.”

  As I’d learned from Shelby Foote, Forrest differed from Lee in another way, which helped explain his special appeal to working-class Southerners. Born to poverty and possessing little formal education, Forrest was a self-made man who became a wealthy slave trader before the War and rose from private to lieutenant-general during the conflict. “Come on boys,” Forrest once wrote in a recruiting ad, “if you want a heap of fun and to kill some Yankees.”

  I continued my chat with Dresch at a local diner, over cornbread, turnip greens, and ham. Dresch confessed that he’d added some padding during his years in Dixie, and also adopted a slight Southern inflection. “Subconsciously, I’ve probably worked on that,” he admitted. But Dresch maintained one curious tie to the North. His flags were made, not by diehard Southern seamstresses, but by a sect of Apostolic Lutheran women in the upper peninsula of Michigan, one of the most northerly reaches of the continental United States. Dresch had met a few of the women during a visit to Michigan and was impressed by their work ethic and attention to detail. Sewing from their homes, these Northern women now earned $6 an hour making flags from a pattern book called Emblems of Southern Valor.

  “One of the ladies quit because she thought the flag represented opposition to the U.S.,” Dresch said. “But most of them don’t have much idea what this is all about.”

>   I asked Dresch what Edmund Ruffin might think of a company bearing the firebrand’s name that nonetheless maintained business ties to the perfidious Yankee race. Dresch shrugged. “He’d probably put a bullet through my head.” For a man named after the author of “Fear and Loathing Unto Death,” Soren Dresch seemed remarkably unperturbed by the contradictions of his peculiar livelihood.

  After lunch, Dresch reached into his pickup and selected a Ruffin T-shirt and several other items for me to take home. “Let me know how they play up in Virginia,” he said, heading back to his office. “I haven’t got much market penetration up there.”

  MY SECOND WEEK in Atlanta, I stopped at the city’s main tourist office and chatted with a genial redhead named Mary Ann. I told her I’d visited Stone Mountain and a few other War-related sites, and wondered if I’d missed anything.

  “Not much,” she said. Then, digging through a drawer, she pulled out a brochure in rather the manner of a convenience store clerk reaching for a plastic-covered Hustler. “We don’t display this one because it wouldn’t be P.C. and someone might be offended,” she explained. The pamphlet, compiled by a local Daughter of the Confederacy named Izabell Buzzett, offered a brief guide to rebel monuments scattered around Atlanta. I told Mary Ann I’d collected dozens of similar brochures across the South. She nodded, adding sotto voce: “In most other cities, this would be out front and Mrs. Buzzett would be standing here behind the counter, not me.”

  But this was Atlanta. Nor was there much demand for traditional Confederate history from the tourists who came into Mary Ann’s office. “Where’s Tara? That’s always their first question,” she said. “Then, ‘Where are Scarlett and Rhett buried, and are they next to each other?’”

  “What do you tell them?”

  Mary Ann smiled. “I try to break the news gently. ‘Honey, you know it’s a movie, don’t you?’ Then I have to explain that the whole thing was filmed in California. Not one scene in Georgia.” Tara’s fields were actually a patch of the San Fernando Valley, tinted red to look like Georgia. Even the oak trees around Tara were fake, crafted from telephone poles.

  “It’s sad to shatter people’s illusions,” Mary Ann said. “They expect Tara to be right here by the Civic Center.” As consolation, she pointed them to a collection of movie memorabilia at the Road To Tara Museum and a reproduction plantation at Stone Mountain.

  One group, though, always wanted more. “The Japanese worship Scarlett,” Mary Ann said. “They always come in here and say, ‘I am searching for Gone With the Window.’”

  I lolled outside for a while, thumbing through the brochures Mary Ann had given me. I could of course follow the trail Mrs. Buzzett laid out, and search for obscure Confederate obelisks. But I’d been there, done that. I was also intrigued by Mary Ann’s comments, which confirmed something I’d sensed throughout my travels: Gone With the Wind had done more to keep the Civil War alive, and to mold its memory, than any history book or event since Appomattox. Anyway, Atlanta begged for a different approach. Why dig for the real and unremembered past when I could search like the Japanese for the fictional one instead?

  THE INTERSTATE EXIT for Jonesboro, half an hour south of Atlanta, spilled onto Tara Boulevard. The road led past Tara Auto World, Tara Mobile Home Park, Tara Hardware, Tara Baptist Church and the usual offerings of fast food, fast gas and fast cash. I turned off Tara Boulevard, past Tara Music, Tara Trophies, Tara Florist and entered downtown Jonesboro, a pleasant row of brick storefronts facing a railroad depot with a sign that said, “Home of Gone With the Wind.” At the Clayton County Chamber of Commerce, a picture of Tara hung behind the front desk. Lee Davis, the chamber’s vice president for marketing, reached for my copy of the novel. “Clayton County—we’re mentioned right there on page six,” she said. “That’s the world’s best marketing program.”

  Davis had one problem, though; there wasn’t anything in Jonesboro or Clayton County to market. In the phone book, there were forty-seven listings under Tara, including Tara Billiards, Tara Church of Christ, Tara Dermatology Center, Tara Sanitation. The only thing missing was Tara.

  “Margaret Mitchell’s great-grandparents, the Fitzgeralds, had a place near here,” Davis said. “But that’s it.” Nor did modern Clayton County much resemble the countryside Mitchell described in her novel as a “pleasant land of white houses, peaceful plowed fields and sluggish yellow rivers.” Now a fast-growing bedroom suburb of Atlanta, Clayton County’s “savagely red land” had been plowed under for subdivisions and shopping malls. Also, like Peachtree Street, the setting for Gone With the Wind was no longer an exclusive address. “Just about every county in Georgia already tries to cash in on the whole hoop-skirt thing,” Davis said.

  On the way out, we paused at a lobby exhibit of Gone With the Wind memorabilia. Beside a movie still of Vivien Leigh I noticed a picture of a woman who looked remarkably like her. “Who’s that?” I asked.

  “Oh, that’s Scarlett O’Hara,” Davis said. “The professional one, I mean. She won some pageant a few years back and she’s pretty much been Scarlett ever since.”

  Her real name was Melly Meadows—short for Melanie, just like Ashley Wilkes’s wife—and she lived nearby. So I gave her a call and arranged to meet at her home office just off Jonesboro’s main street. The young woman who greeted me on the porch wore tight blue jeans and a loose, open-necked blouse. But there was no mistaking her resemblance to Scarlett, at least as portrayed by Vivien Leigh: alabaster skin, slim waist, oval face, cupid-bow mouth and long dark hair tied back with an emerald-green ribbon.

  “I’m so happy you came by,” she said, gently shaking my hand. “Here, let me give you my brochure and business card.”

  Embossed on the card was her photograph in antebellum dress and Melly “Scarlett” Meadows printed in both English and Japanese. “Southern Belles & Gentlemen also available,” the pamphlet said. Melly invited me to join her on the porch swing. “I’ve sort of become Scarlett O’Hara Incorporated,” she sighed.

  Melly Meadows was a self-made Southern belle. After years of being teased by classmates about her resemblance to Vivien Leigh, she entered a Scarlett look-alike contest at a local mall and beat forty other wannabes (her sister was runner-up). After that, she started donning her hoop skirt for local charity events. Before long, she’d been hired to appear at business breakfasts, ribbon cuttings and other promotional events around Atlanta. She’d gone on to promote everything from Vidalia onions to tourism in Atlanta to Coca-Cola in Japan. In a good year she cleared $50,000.

  Now in her early twenties, Melly was planning for life after Scarlett, and had begun studying at a local college. “I want to be a Christian evangelist,” she said. This seemed like quite a jump, from belle to Bible student. But Melly didn’t think so. “I stick to best-selling books,” she explained.

  Actually, Melly hadn’t read Gone With the Wind until recently. Nor did she study the book for beauty tips; apart from staying out of the sun to keep Scarlett’s “magnolia-white skin,” the look came naturally to Melly. But hoop skirts took some getting used to. Her antebellum attire weighed over twenty pounds and was hard to walk in. At first, Melly said, she often knocked over chairs and plants. And once, while sprinting across a rain-soaked plantation yard for a TV commercial, she’d run up her hoop and collapsed in the mud.

  “You realize real quick that it wasn’t all that glamorous back then,” she said. “With all those hoops and crinolines and pantalets, women were probably sweaty and stinky most of the time.”

  Nor did the costume transform male admirers into bold Rhett Butlers. Melly noticed that men tended instead to become shy and respectful. “Anyway, it’s hard to get very close to someone in a hoop skirt.” Melly had also learned to deflect unwanted advances with Scarlett-like brass. “I just smile and say, ‘You’re a black-hearted varmint’ or ‘I should slap you in the face!’”

  Melly kept an office in the modest brick bungalow where she still lived with her mother. She led me to a back room equipped
with a fax, laser printer and five telephone lines. “With rollover and voice mail of course,” she said. “I have a cellular phone when I’m on the road.”

  She booted up her computer and showed me a file called “Belles.” It listed thirty-some women she’d trained as stand-ins. “If someone calls with a job and I can’t do it,” she explained, “I tell them, ‘I can book you someone else.’ I subcontract Rhetts, too.” She even had a Mammy on tap. I asked if she felt any discomfort with this aspect of her Old South role. “Not really,” she said. “Scarlett was disrespectful to everyone. She’s often mean, a bit harsh. If anything, she was nicer to her slaves than she was to her children.”

  Melly, though, did find some qualities in Scarlett with which to identify. “I like her flair for business, that’s a similarity. And I’m fairly feisty.” Melly also shared Scarlett’s fondness for shocking behavior. Once, at a formal event welcoming Japan’s royalty to Atlanta, Melly fell to chatting with the Empress. “I thought to myself, gosh, their life is awfully structured,” Melly recalled. “So when she asked me if I wore a corset, I said in a loud voice, ‘Do you want to see my underwear?’” Then Melly lifted her skirt to reveal red pantalets. The gesture pleased the Empress and made Melly an instant celebrity in Japan.

  Melly had since visited Tokyo several times and now spoke Japanese well enough to make small talk with admirers. “Once I was speaking Japanese to a tourist in Atlanta and a woman gasped, ‘Oh my gosh, the Japanese have even bought Scarlett O’Hara!’”

  Like Mary Ann, the woman I’d met at the tourist office, Melly sensed a special Japanese affinity for Gone With the Wind. “In some ways, their culture is similar to the Old South,” she said. “Traditional women wear kimonos and are admired for their delicate nature, while men are tough and strong.” Melly showed me a Japanese newspaper profile of her and translated the headline: “Miss Scarlett, A Traditional Japanese Girl.”