Mountains Mainly Passing Muster
Stone Mountain and Kennesaw Mountain, Georgia
This month I’m making a 12-day drive from Florida through Georgia, Tennessee, Kentucky, West Virginia, Virginia, and the Carolinas. I’ll visit some historic sites with emotional significance for many Americans; Civil War and Revolutionary War museums; state parks; historical associations; and memorabilia and gun shops. To get a better sense of the narratives attached to these places and the events and people they might commemorate, I’ll be looking at the signage, collecting the literature, and talking to visitors, staff, guides, and rangers. And of course, mining the gift shops!
Narrative Nation is my place to collect some thoughts and images as I go. Ideally, some parts of these reflections will be incorporated into the book I am developing with the working title “Loads of Heresy”: White Supremacist Revisions of the American Narrative. But for now these stories are drafts to help me think about what I’m seeing and hearing. Please comment with corrections and add your own experiences with the way our nation’s story—past and present—is being told.
Stone Mountain Park
The final stop on the long first day of our trip was Stone Mountain, Georgia. This park owned by the State of Georgia is famous for having the largest Confederate monument and the largest carving in the country. This rock, on which Generals Robert E. Lee and Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson along with CSA President Jefferson “stop the steal” Davis and their three horses are carved, is also the largest piece of exposed granite in the world.
Much has been written about the carving’s initial purpose. There’s nothing benign about it. Like so many Confederate monuments, it was initially conceived and supported by the United Daughters of the Confederacy and has been the location of Ku Klux Klan rallies. After a false start on the carving in the 1920s, the effort was reinvigorated in the 1950s by racist Georgia Governor Marvin Griffin in response to desegregation orders. Griffin arranged for the state to purchase the mountain. The park was officially and pointedly re-opened on the 100th anniversary of Lincoln’s assassination in 1965, and the carving was essentially complete by 1970. The Southern Poverty Law Center called it “the Klan’s sacred stone.” It’s impossible to make the “heritage, not hate” argument on this one, unless that heritage is the KKK’s twentieth-century resurgence or the State of Georgia’s resistance to desegregation.
Today, the Stone Mountain experience has more of a state park/theme park vibe than I expected. After paying $20 to drive in to the park, we found a way to avoid $40 more per person for access to all of the “attractions” by purchasing $15 tickets for a one-way, five-minute ride to the top of the mountain. Waiting for the “Skyride” cable car, we observed the diversity of the American and international families in line with us. No one sported aggressively patriotic gear. No one wore a MAGA hat, camo pants, or a threatening t-shirt.
Inside the Skyride, the young African American presenter provided information about the size of the carvings and the rock formation we were looking at. He named the three men but did not explain their importance or mention the Civil War. A six-foot tall person could stand inside the mouth of one of the horses, and two busses could fit on one of their backs. There was no opportunity to speak to the presenter, but I wonder if he personally decided to omit discussion of the Confederacy and the ongoing controversies about the future of the carving, or if the park has decided to minimize that story as a matter of policy.
On top of the mountain, there are some viewing stations and a small gift shop with t-shirts about the geological formation and conquering the climb, but again we saw nothing about the Civil War generals commemorated on the nation’s largest carving just below us. In the center picture below, you can see remnants of what used to be a circle including Confederate flags. As we walked back down on the rock path, we passed a small outdoor amphitheater with a United States flag and a Confederate Army flag, but that’s all the memorialization we saw.
The main thoroughfares around this state park are still named after the three figures. These most obvious aspects of Confederate commemoration remain, but the park was not otherwise at pains to discuss very much of that history. As you can see from my photographs, the carving is not very legible anymore. The small education center was closed by the time we walked down the mountain, and like our Skyride announcer, the signage outside made no mention of the Civil War. The mounted timeline stops in the early 1850s.
Most of the people we saw in the park were walking the trails, jogging around the perimeter, taking the scenic train ride, or visiting the dinosaur attractions. Surely the location near a major city with so much diversity and tourism has helped those responsible for telling the Stone Mountain story move away from the Confederate emphasis.
The massive carving looked comfortingly small from our vantage point on the Skyride. But I also know that’s an optical illusion. While the park doesn’t celebrate the Lost Cause through its signage and tour presentations, visitors to the park are also not provided with the true story of its most notable feature. There’s still a lot of explaining to do.
Stone Mountain Village
Leaving the park, we decided to check out the nearby town, historic Stone Mountain Village. A municipal parking lot was quickly filling with locals setting up chairs and coolers to watch live music along Main Street. With Juneteenth ten days away, banners celebrating the accomplishments of local African Americans lined the street.
At the edge of the strip, a Georgia Historical Commission sign from 1954 describes what happened there 90 years before, when the Union overwhelmed the Confederates and took out some essential infrastructure. The sign is not rabidly pro-Confederate, but the language drums up sympathy for the units who made “all possible defense efforts, both days” against Union-led destruction.
By facing the right direction on that day, you could look simultaneously at the 1950s sign and a banner commemorating James B. Rivers (1940-2019), Stone Mountain’s first black chief of police. After those Juneteenth banners come down, the public narrative on Main Street will feel much less complete.
Kennesaw Mountain National Battlefield Park
After spending the night at my brother-in-law’s apartment in Atlanta, we drove about 25 miles northwest to the town of Kennesaw, dipped into Target to buy a new cooler for the rest of the trip, and drove into Kennesaw Mountain National Battlefield Park. Entering on a Saturday morning, we saw families and joggers of every description. Like the crowd at Stone Mountain the previous day, visitors to Kennesaw Mountain (KEMO) represented the diversity of the Atlanta metro area.
We didn’t have much time for a stop at this park on our way to Nashville, so we went to the visitor’s center, browsed the gift shop, and attended a cannon firing demonstration. The visitor center and demonstration field are positioned "between the lines" along old Highway 41, and there is really no sense that you’re participating in some kind of new insurrection fantasy.
These re-enactors were on average much older than the Union soldiers' average age of 25, and several pot bellies didn't add to the realism. But they seemed to be properly dressed, and some good beards added to the effect. One of the multiverse’s Walt Whitmans was there, but in this version more portly than he ever was in our own, and firing the weapon instead of nursing those who got caught on the other side of it.
We sat safely on the Visitor Center’s patio and waited a long few minutes for the cannon to be fired. They used only a half charge, but we were warned it would be very loud. I was prepared and steadied my hand to take the video posted below, but I jumped a bit when it really happened. Only the crying baby you can hear in the small crowd of spectators seemed to understand what this represented.
With its new grooved shaft and hollow cannonballs and cartridges filled with lead pieces, the monster we looked at was “the most deadly weapon of the Civil War.” But the speaker himself did no harm. He offered a balanced presentation of what both sides were up against in the battle at Kennesaw Mountain, he referred to “enslaved people” rather than “slaves,” and he did not forget to discuss the plight of the poor horses used in this kind of fighting. He talked about weapons development, the impact of trench warfare on the Atlanta Campaign, and the historic railroad.
The Kennesaw Mountain Junior Ranger Book is similarly free of Lost Cause and “states’ rights” rhetoric. On the page dedicated to explaining the Civil War to children, the booklet says,
The southern states seceded because President Lincoln wanted to put an end to slavery in the United States. The southern states did not like this idea because . . . they used slaves to work the fields in order to make their living. They saw the ideas of President Lincoln as a threat to their livelihood. The secession of the southern states was the event that led to the Civil War.
Now was that so hard to say?
That’s from the free booklet published by the National Park Service, but a lot of the merchandise in the gift shop elicited an overall feeling of war glorification and seemed to lean a bit South.
Deadly weapons were presented as toys and even as jewelry, and the children’s books were way too happy about the whole thing. In a few spots I was reminded of that enthusiastic sign at the Jefferson Davis surrender site: “The Civil War begins!”
Love the Junior Ranger Book's 4 sentence explanation for the Civil War. Also those photos make me wonder what Civil War gift shops in New England offer for sale... or if there even are Civil War gift shops in New England....
Some of this is encouraging; there seems to be a conscious effort to evolve. "Portly Walt Whitman" was a nice touch!