Anyone who's driven around the American South has seen the "Confederate flag" somewhere, often hanging or flying near an American flag. Much of Southern culture and identity seems to be focused around patriotism, even while people espouse "Lost Cause" ideology. How did this region go from insurrection to fervent patriotism, and how have those two ideas been reconciled so completely in many peoples' minds?
This is not an answer to your question as such but you may wish to examine closely the language you're using and determine if you mean "nationalism" or "patriotism" and what, if any, distinction exists between the two. I raise this question because the focus on the primacy of the state vs that of national culture and identity changes the nature of the conflict you're addressing.
I'd also argue that this may not be the most suitable sub for this question as notions of patriotism and national identity are socially constructed and our modern viewpoint presupposes a modern definition of both, which necessarily falls within the 20 year blackout zone.
That said, you're probably asking two questions - how the Lost Cause is compatible with American Patriotism and how southern culture came to be seen as more authentically American (regionally or nationally) than, say, Eastern or Western or Southwestern culture.
Great question, and I think there's some unpacking to be done before I start tackling it.
First, patriotism is a really subjective issue. As a Washington Post blogger noted in 2016, "Patriotism is an inherently difficult thing to quantify. It means different things to different people, certainly. Which makes measuring it an inherently flawed exercise."
Of course, that hasn't stopped folks from trying.
When we talk about American patriotism, it's difficult to get into people's minds. We're left to examine expressions of external, physical action. That's why the study linked above uses things like military enlistment, voter participation and similar factors.
When we talk about the American South in history, we can do the same thing. One really fascinating way to examine the issue is by looking at Fourth of July celebrations in the American South. These are physical manifestations of patriotism (regardless of definition), and they're good data points to study.
One of the most famous (and extreme) examples can be found in Vicksburg, Tennessee Mississippi, whose Confederate defenders surrendered to the Union Army of Ulysses S. Grant on July 4, 1863. That coincidence, coupled with deep Southern sectionalist beliefs, meant the city didn't formally celebrate the Fourth of July again until 1945, when it was caught up in patriotic fervor with the end of World War II.
As I said, Vicksburg was an extreme example. Most Southern towns and cities celebrated the Fourth of July in 1919, following the end of World War I.
Paul Quigley, a historian of the American South, has written repeatedly on the tug-of-war between sectionalism and nationalism in the South during the antebellum period. His paper "Independence Day Dilemmas in the American South, 1848-1865" was published in the May 2009 issue of The Journal of Southern History, and he subsequently expanded upon that topic with a standalone book.
One of the more interesting sources he cites (and one unfortunately available to me) is a 1987 master's thesis entitled "The Transformation of the Fourth of July in South Carolina, 1850 to 1919" that goes into depth about how many South Carolinians balked at celebrating the Fourth of July until World War I. For the latter part of the 19th century, their sectionalism trumped their patriotism.
World War I (and to a lesser extent World War II and the Spanish-American War) forced Southerners to choose whether that remained so. If they valued their identity as Southerners more than Americans, they likely would not enlist in the U.S. military. If they valued their identity as Americans, they would enlist, and they did do so.
This matches the trend toward homogenization and away from regionalism that we see in the latter part of the 20th century. In 1976, John Shelton Reed performed a famous study in which he tracked and mapped the prevalence of the words "Dixie" and "Southern" in business names as indicators of sectionalism. That study was repeated in 2010, and in " Declining Dixie: Regional Identification in the Modern American South," the authors from Western Carolina University found "that the instances of 'Dixie' have dropped precipitously, although identification with the word 'Southern' has remained more constant, providing evidence of a trend we term re-southernization. We also find that the relative number of blacks in the population provides the most consistent explanation of regional identity."
This might be more of an /r/AskAnthropology question?
Hi there people!
This thread has seen a lot of responses that didn't comply with our rules, meaning that they didn't approach the question of attitudes in the Southern US to symbols of the US as a nation from a historical stand-point to provide an in-depth, comprehensive, and academically informed answer.
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