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Sunday, October 20, 2002

By Dennis B. Roddy, Post-Gazette Staff Writer

On a day when his Butler Area High School classmates were studying, among other things, the history of their nation, Matt Cole was at home whistling "Dixie," and it wasn't a happy tune.

	A "Dixie" tattoo on the shoulder of Butler High School junior Matt Cole prompted a confrontation with the school principal and led to Matt's suspension from school. (Steve Mellon, Post-Gazette)

Already at war with his principal over a ban on the Confederate battle flag, Cole paid a weekend visit to a tattoo parlor and turned up in school last week with a red heart and the word "Dixie" on his left shoulder. When he flashed it to Principal Dale Lumley, the ensuing argument ended with a very singular curse from Cole and a single day suspension from Lumley.

"It kind of slipped out. One 'F word'," Matt conceded. "It was my fault."

What remains unresolved is a cultural mystery as deep as the racial divides that crisscross America: Why are some Northern, rural, white males -- like the nameless Union private who stands atop the Civil War monument in the center of Butler -- trying to keep alive the flame of an Old South they never knew?

The Butler school board had to ponder that one two weeks ago when it voted to banish the Confederate flag and other symbols from an increasingly edgy high school campus. Among the results: Matthew McGee, a high school senior, has been forced to cover over the stars and bars he painted atop his pickup truck, something he did to replicate the "General Lee" car from the 1980s television series "The Dukes of Hazzard."

"We don't wear it to represent slavery and racism. We wear it to honor the South and all the 260,000 men and women who died fighting for it," said Cole, who was born in Pennsylvania and was unable to cite any specific ties to the Confederacy, though he recalls once seeing some sort of document he vaguely thinks might connect him.

"I remember papers at my great-grandma's house that have some stuff in them," he said. "But I'm not sure."

The only certainty in the fuss that apparently began when a white student showed up at a homecoming event in a KKK shirt, sparking the objections that ultimately led to a banishment of the Confederate flag, is that both sides of the dispute now claim to be victims of discrimination.

"I got told that if we went on defending the rebel flag, a lot of pain would be brought to us," Cole said. "I don't think they should single us out."

"The Confederate flag was against Northern white people, too," said Diane Wideman, mother of one of the black students who took offense at the symbol when it turned up in school. "How much are you supposed to let go by?"

Butler is not alone in trying to sort through the minefield of messages, intended or otherwise, that encircles the flag under which Robert E. Lee fought.

School districts around the country have banished the symbol from their property. The U.S. Supreme Court has refused to overturn rulings by lower courts that upheld a Veterans Administration ban on Confederate flags at U.S. military cemeteries, including those where Confederate soldiers are buried.

And in perhaps one of the more painful ironies, Virginia Military Institute, whose cadets fought for the South at the battle of Newmarket, Va., and whose buildings stand within yards of Lee's grave, is considering forbidding cadets from displaying anything with the stars and bars on it.

And, to take the litany of offenses full circle, Virginia congressional candidate Ben Jones, a former civil rights marcher who went on to play Cooter in the "Dukes of Hazzard," is under fire for appearing at campaign stops with the stars-and-bars-emblazoned "General Lee" Dodge.

"It's almost the equivalent of a Nazi flag in many peoples' minds," said Shelby Foote, a descendant of Confederate soldiers and a celebrated historian of the Civil War.

Foote, who admires the Confederacy for its resilience but resigned from the Sons of the Confederacy over its support for segregation, believes the Confederate flag's meaning has been hijacked "by morons on both sides."

"There are people who idolize it for something it wasn't and people who hate it for something it wasn't. You had Orville Faubus in Arkansas and George Wallace in Alabama causing all kinds of trouble and flying the Confederate flag when they did it. No wonder the flag got to be what it became in many peoples' minds."

Precisely what the flag has become in the mind of Matt Cole and his friends is somewhat elusive, though they insist they are not racists and did not intend to offend others.

"These kids are hillbillies -- they don't bother anybody. They like fishing and hunting and country music," said Matt's father, Robert Cole. "All kids want to be rebels."

There might be something to that argument, according to David Imhoof, a Texas-born professor of history at Susquehanna University who vehemently dislikes the Confederate flag.

"I've seen Germans occasionally use it -- in particular, the rockabilly '50s semi-punk guys like to use the Confederate flag," Imhoof said. "It'll usually be on their jacket right next to a patch of Elvis Presley. It will be a symbol of American rebellious rock 'n' roll."

Why that symbol pops up in a North that lost 360,000 men in the Civil War worries some civil rights advocates.

"Many kids are responding negatively to assertions of black pride or affirmative action," said Mark Potok, a researcher at the Southern Poverty Law Center in Montgomery, Ala. "You see this kind of Confederate mythology increasingly adopted in more and more Northern states."

Potok has monitored a variety of racist "neo-confederate" groups that he says have latched onto the Confederate flag as a unifying symbol.

To Imhoof, who has studied Civil War re-enactors and why some from Northern states decide to portray Confederate soldiers, much of the attraction is "the appeal of the lost cause" -- a very American trait.

To Diane Wideman, whose daughter, Laura, was among those who appealed for the ban, it is a lost cause best left abandoned.

"Nobody," she said, "needs a symbol to be a rebel."