I want to be positive to begin with, because I will say some unkind things in this review. This was a deeply frustrating book to read and at times a labor just to get to the very end. However, I learned a lot about the history of the Confederate flag from reading it. I feel much more informed about its history and better qualified to examine its role in American society than I was before I read it. In that regard this book was an unqualified success - I got out of the experience what I most hoped to when I started reading it. However, getting there was something of a chore. I don’t mean in terms of the writing, which is largely fine even if it can drag at times with the inclusion of too many case studies with too much superfluous detail. Instead, it is in Coski’s analysis of the history of the flag that the problems begin to arise.
Many of my frustrations with this book are arguably best summarised by this passage:
“The motives of each state for embracing the St. Andrew’s cross battle flag as part of its official symbollism are murky and open to debate. Georgia, Alabama, and South Carolina did so during the eventful 1950s and 1960s. The coincidence of the Civil War Centennial and the civil rights movement makes it difficult to discern whether the states intended the battle flag as an historical war memorial or as a gesture of defiance to federally mandated integration”
This is not the only time Coski expresses an opinion in this vein and it is made particularly baffling because throughout the text Coski emphasises the links between the adoption and wider use of the Confederate battle flag and opposition to the Civil Rights Movement. While there may not be a smoking gun showing that the incorporation of the battle flag into several southern states’ flags was a racist reaction to federal pressure to provide equal rights to black Americans, the evidence is still overwhelming and to deny it is to be deliberately obtuse. Coski’s reluctance to see what is clearly before him was a particularly stark contrast with my recent reading of Ty Seidule’s Robert E. Lee and Me. Seidule was able to see what was happening in similar cases with perfect clarity. In fact, at times Coski is able to clearly identify the issue, such as in this passage:
“Confederate symbols in public spaces - often vestiges of the flag fad era - can exist unnoticed for decades. They are tangible reminders of the former prominence of Confederate veterans and their progeny in southern life - and, not coincidentally, of the exclusion of African Americans from mainstreem public life during the Jim Crow era.”
The book thus frequently comes across as in conflict with itself. Coski is reluctant to acknowledge what seems obvious for pages and then will do so in a paragraph before going back to denying it in the next chapter. It does not help that the book contains little to no information about Reconstruction or the Jim Crow south. In fact, the book is almost entirely lacking in wider context for any of the anecdotes or case studies contained within it. Readers will really need to already be steeped in the history of neo-Confederate movements of the 20th century to get much out of this book, because you will have to provide your own analysis to supplement or correct what is contained within its pages. While no expert myself, I have read enough to have noticed the glaring absences in Coski’s text.
A particularly worrying trend that runs through the book but most prominently emerges in its concluding chapters is the indication that Coski believes, on some level, that the cause of the American Civil War was a dispute over states’ rights. While it is clear from the text as a whole that he does not deny slavery’s role in causing the war, it seems that he believes - or at least argues - that the issue of states rights was at least of comparable importance to slavery in causing the war. This factors into his explanations as to why individuals might wave a Confederate flag as a non-racist symbol. In my eyes, this ignores vast amounts of research on the origins of the American Civil War and engages in a level of Lost Cause-ism.
This is aggravated even further by the fact that discussion of the Lost Cause is almost entirely absent from the book. One would think that an account of the changing meaning of the flags of the Confederacy would tackle how the Lost Cause shaped American’s understanding of the war but in this case you would be wrong. The book skips over most of the early twentieth century and spends far more time on free speech disputes during the 1990s than it does to Jim Crow or the Lost Cause. The analysis of a case study of a black man shooting and killing a white man for, apparently, waving the Confederate flag on his truck is given far more prominence than cases of lynching and repression of Black Americans during the Jim Crow era.
The book also seems to overly emphasise white voices and those of neo-Confederate heritage groups over those of black Americans who have suffered under the white supremacist policies that have dominated America and particularly the southern states that made up the Confederacy. These voices are not entirely absent, but the book does not really engage with scholarship on racism in America and skips past the Jim Crow era with very little description. It often takes a framing that steps very close to the line, without fully embracing it, of suggesting that Black people were fine with Confederate flags before the 1950s, so why all the fuss in the 1990s? It makes little effort to consider the context under which Black Americans lived their lives in those preceding decades and what these symbols might mean to them.
While Coski insists in the introduction that he is adopting a purely relativist approach, i.e. that the Confederate flag has no objective meaning but means what supporters/detractors think it does and can contain these many meanings simultaneously, he does periodically engage in the notion that historical commemoration of the flag is an objective and unobjectionable use of it. Thus the use of the flag by neo-Confederate groups like the Sons of Confederate Veterans or the United Daughters of the Confederacy should be seen as neutral and only perverted by groups like the KKK. While some passages contradict this notion, a common theme in a book full of self-contradiction, it is nevertheless present and frustrating.
I also resent the notion presented periodically that the Confederate battle flag as an emblem of white southern identity. While I acknowledge that Coski is framing it this way to clarify that most black southerners would not identify with the flag, it also concedes to the idea that all southerners were Confederates or are Confederate sympathisers. Parts of the South didn’t secede, some key Union generals were southerners, and not every modern southerner is a neo-Confederate and I think this framing erases that internal conflict in favour of portraying the South and the Confederacy as being almost the same thing. This is the perspective that neo-Confederate groups want, and I don’t intend to concede that position to them.
Fundamentally, Coski has done an excellent job at pulling together many threads of how the Confederate flag has been used by historical actors from the Civil War through the turn of the 21st century. However, the pattern he has woven with those threads is of a more questionable quality. In terms of analysis this book was a very frustrating read, swaying wildly between interesting points and analysis that seemed to fly in the face of the obvious. Coski bends over backwards to make this an issue where “both sides” can be in the wrong, and in so doing delivers an unsatisfying and limited analysis of the Confederate Flag’s role in modern society. I learned a lot from this book and it helped expand my understanding of the flag’s history, but I also found myself frequently annoyed and frustrated by it and would not recommend it to pretty much anyone. If you feel you need to know more about the context of the Confederate Battle Flags’ resurgence after the war then this book will give you that, but that is some very niche knowledge and unless you have a reason for needing that knowledge I wouldn’t recommend reading this book to acquire it.